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BY 

EDWARD DOWDEN 



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Class 
Book 






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EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY 



SOUTHEY 



BY 



EDWARD DOWDEN. 




NEW YORK AND LONDON 

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

1902 









)f«x 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. 

Edited by John Morley. 



Johnson Leslie Stephen. 

Gibbon J. C. Morison. 

Scott R. H. Hutton. 

Shelley J. A. Symonds. 

Hume T. H. Huxley. 

Goldsmith William Black. 

Defoe William Minto. 

Burns J. C. Shairp. 

Spenser R. W. Church. 

Thackeray Anthony Trollope. 

Burke John Morley. 

Milton Mark Pattison. 

Hawthorne Henry James, Jr. 

Southey E. Dowden. 

Chaucer A. W. Ward 

Bunyan J. A. Froude. 

Cowper Goldwin Smith. 

Pope Leslie Stephen. 

Byron John Nichol. 

Carlyle... 



Locke Thomas Fowler. 

Wordsworth F. Myers. 

Dryden G. Saintsbury. 

Landor Sidney Colvin. 

De Quincey ..David Masson. 

Lamb Alfred Ainger. 

Bentley R. C Jebb. 

Dickens A. W. Ward 

Gray E. W. Gosse. 

Swift Leslie Stephen. 

Sterne H. D. Traill. 

Macaulay J. Cotter Morison. 

Fielding Austin Dobson. 

Sheridan Mrs. Oliphant. 

Addison W. J. Courthope. 

Bacon R. W. Church. 

Coleridge. . . . , H. D. Traill. 

Sir Philip Sidney... J. A. Symonds. 

Keats Sidney Colvin. 

.John Nichol. 



i2mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume. 
Other volumes in preparation. 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 



fl®~ Any of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any pari 
of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price. 






NOTE. 

I am indebted throughout to The Life and Correspond- 
ence of Robert Soutkey, edited by the Rev. C. C. South ey, 
six volumes, 1850, and to Selections from the Letters of 
Robert Southey, edited by J. W. Warter, B.D., four vol- 
umes, 1856. Many other sources have been consulted. 
I thank Mr. W. J. Craig for help given in examining 
Southey manuscripts, and Mr. T. W. Lyster for many valu- 
able suggestions. 



CONTENTS, 



CHAPTER I. 

PAflE 

Childhood 1 



CHAPTER II. 
Westminster, Oxford, Pantisocracy, and Marriage . 19 

CHAPTER III. 
Wanderings, 1795—1803 44 

CHAPTER TV. 
Ways op Life at Keswick, 1803—1839 80 

CHAPTER V. 
Ways of Life at Keswick, 1803—1839 (continued) . . 112 

CHAPTER VI. 
Changes and Events, 1803—1843 142 

CHAPTER VII. 
Southey's Work in Literature 187 



SOUTHEY. 

CHAPTER I. 

CHILDHOOD. 

No one of his generation lived so completely in and for 
literature as did Southey. "He is," said Byron, "the 
only existing entire man of letters." With him literature 
served the needs both of the material life and of the life 
of the intellect and imagination ; it was his means of earn- 
ing daily bread, and also the means of satisfying his high- 
est ambitions and desires. This, which was true of Southey 
at five-and-twenty years of age, was equally true at forty, 
fifty, sixty. During all that time he was actively at work 
accumulating, arranging, and distributing knowledge; no 
one among his contemporaries gathered so large a store 
from the records of the past; no one toiled with such 
steadfast devotion to enrich his age; no one occupied so 
honourable a place in so many provinces of literature. 
There is not, perhaps, any single work of Southey's the 
loss of which would be felt by us as a capital misfortune. 
But the more we consider his total work, its mass, its va- 
riety, its high excellence, the more we come to regard it as 
a memorable, an extraordinary achievement. 
1* 



2 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

Southey himself, however, stands above his works. In 
subject they are disconnected, and some of them appear 
like huge fragments. It is the presence of one mind, one 
character in all, easily recognizable by him who knows 
Southey, which gives them a vital unity. We could lose 
the History of Brazil, or the Peninsular War, or the Life 
of Wesley, and feel that if our possessions were diminish- 
ed, we ourselves in our inmost being had undergone no 
loss which might not easily be endured. But he who 
has once come to know Southey's voice as the voice of a 
friend, so clear, so brave, so honest, so full of boyish glee, 
so full of manly tenderness, feels that if he heard that 
voice no more a portion of his life were gone. To make 
acquaintance with the man is better than to study the 
subjects of his books. In such a memoir as the present, 
to glance over the contents of a hundred volumes, dealing 
with matters widely remote, would be to wander upon a 
vast circumference when we ought to strike for the centre. 
If the reader come to know Southey as he read and wrote 
in his library, as he rejoiced and sorrowed among his chil- 
dren, as he held hands with good old friends, as he walked 
by the lake-side, or lingered to muse near some mountain 
stream, as he hoped and feared for England, as he thought 
of life and death and a future beyond the grave, the end 
of this small book will have been attained. 

At the age of forty-six Robert Southey wrote the first 
of a series of autobiographic sketches ; his spirit was cou- 
rageous, and life had been good to him ; but it needed 
more than his courage to live again in remembrance with 
so many of the dead ; having told the story of his boy- 
hood, he had not the heart to go farther. The autobiog- 
raphy rambles pleasantly into by-ways of old Bath and 
Bristol life ; at Westminster School it leaves him. So far 



l] CHILDHOOD. 3 

we shall go along with it ; for what lies beyond, a record 
of Southey's career must be brought together from a mul- 
titude of letters, published or still remaining in manuscript, 
and from many and massy volumes in prose and verse, 
which show how the industrious hours sped by. 

Southey's father was a linen-draper of Bristol. He had 
left his native fields under the Quantock hills to take ser- 
vice in a London shop, but his heart suffered in its exile. 
The tears were in his eyes one day when a porter went by 
carrying a hare, and the remembrance suddenly came to 
him of his rural sports. On his master's death he took a 
place behind the counter of Britton's shop in Wine Street, 
Bristol ; and when, twelve years later, he opened a shop for 
himself in the same business, he had, with tender reminis- 
cence, a hare painted for a device upon his windows. He 
kept his grandfather's sword which had been borne in 
Monmouth's rebellion; he loved the chimes and quarter- 
boys of Christ Church, Bristol, and tried, as church-warden, 
to preserve them. What else of poetry there may have 
been in the life of Robert Southey the elder is lost among 
the buried epics of prosaic lives. We cannot suppose that 
as a man of business he was sharp and shrewd ; he cer- 
tainly was not successful. When the draper's work was 
done, he whiled away the hours over Felix Farley's Bristol 
Journal, his only reading. For library some score of books 
shared with his wine-glasses the small cupboard in the 
back parlour ; its chief treasures were the Spectator, the 
Guardian, some eighteenth-century poems, dead even then, 
and one or two immortal plays. 

On Sundays Mr. Southey, then a bachelor, would stroll 
to Bedminster to dine at the pleasant house of Mrs. Hill 
' — a substantial house to which Edward Hill, gentleman, 
brought his second wife, herself a widow ; a house rich in 



4 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

old English comfort, with its diamond - tiled garden -way 
and jessamine-covered porch, its wainscoted " best kitchen," 
its blue room and green room and yellow room, its grapes 
and greengages and nectarines, its sweet-williams and 
stocks and syringas. Among these pleasant surroundings 
the young draper found it natural, on Sabbath afternoons, 
to make love to pleasant Margaret Hill. " Never," writes 
her son Robert Southey — "never was any human being 
blessed with a sweeter temper or a happier disposition." 
Her face had been marred by the seams of small-pox, but 
its brightness and kindness remained ; there was a charm 
in her clear hazel eyes, so good a temper and so alert an 
understanding were to be read in them. She had not 
gone to any school except one for dancing, and " her state," 
declares Southey, " was the more gracious ;" her father 
had, however, given her lessons in the art of whistling ; 
she could turn a tune like a blackbird. From a mother, 
able to see a fact swiftly and surely, and who knew both 
to whistle and to dance, Southey inherited that alertness 
of intellect and that joyous temper, without which he could 
not have accomplished his huge task-work, never yielding 
to a mood of rebellion or ennui. 

After the courtship on Sunday afternoons came the 
wedding, and before long a beautiful boy was born, who 
died in infancy. On the 12th of August, 1774, Mrs. 
Southey was again in the pain of childbirth. "Is it a 
boy?" she asked the nurse. "Ay, a great ugly boy!" 
With such salutation from his earliest critic the future 
poet-laureate entered this world. "God forgive me," his 
mother exclaimed afterwards, in relating the event, " when 
I saw what a great red creature it was, covered with rolls 
of fat, I thought I should never be able to love him." 
In due time the red creature proved to be a distinctively 



i.] CHILDHOOD. 6 

human child, whose curly hair and sensitive feelings made 
him a mother's darling. He had not yet heard of senti- 
ment or of Rousseau, but he wept at the pathos of roman- 
tic literature, at the tragic fate of the " Children sliding on 
the ice all on a summer's day," or the too early death of 
" Billy Pringle's pig," and he would beg the reciters not 
to proceed. His mother's household cares multiplied, and 
Southey, an unbreeched boy of three years, was borne 
away one morning by his faithful foster-mother Patty to 
be handed over to the tender mercies of a schoolmistress. 
Ma'am Powell was old and grim, and with her lashless 
eyes gorgonized the new pupil ; on the seizure of her hand 
he woke to rebellion, kicking lustily, and crying, " Take 
me to Pat ! I don't like ye ! you've got ugly eyes ! take 
me to Pat, I say !" But soft-hearted Pat had gone home, 
sobbing. 

Mrs. Southey's one weakness was that of submitting too 
meekly to the tyranny of an imperious half-sister, Miss 
Tyler, the daughter of Grandmother Hill by her first mar- 
riage. For this weakness there were excuses ; Miss Tyler 
was an elder sister by many years; she had property of 
her own ; she passed for a person of fashion, and was still 
held to be a beauty ; above all, she had the advantage of a 
temper so capricious and violent that to quarrel with her 
at all might be to lose her sisterly regard for ever. Her 
struggling sister's eldest son took Aunt Tyler's fancy; it 
was a part of her imperious kindness to adopt or half- 
adopt the boy. Aunt Tyler lived in Bath ; in no other 
city could a gentlewoman better preserve health and good 
looks, or enjoy so much society of distinction on easy but 
not too ample means ; it possessed a charming theatre, and 
Miss Tyler was a patron of the drama. To Bath, then, she 
had brought her portrait by Gainsborough, her inlaid cabi- 



6 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

net of ebony, her cherry-wood arm-chair, her mezzotints 
after Angelica Kaufmann, her old-maid hoards of this and 
of that, the woman servant she had saved from the toils of 
matrimony, and the old man, harmless as one of the crick- 
ets which he nightly fed until he died. To Bath Miss Ty- 
ler also brought her nephew ; and she purchased a copy of 
the new gospel of education, Rousseau's Emilius, in order 
to ascertain how Nature should have her perfect work with 
a boy in petticoats. Here the little victim, without com- 
panions, without play, without the child's beatitudes of 
dirt and din, was carefully swathed in the odds and ends 
of habits and humours which belonged to a maiden lady 
of a whimsical, irrational, and self-indulgent temper. Miss 
Tyler, when not prepared for company, wandered about the 
house — a faded beauty — in the most faded and fluttering 
of costumes ; but in her rags she was spotless. To pre- 
serve herself and her worldly gear from the dust, for ever 
floating and gathering in this our sordid atmosphere, was 
the business of her life. Her acquaintances she divided 
into the clean and the unclean — the latter class being much 
the more numerous. Did one of the unclean take a seat 
in her best room, the infected chair must be removed to 
the garden to be aired. But did he seat himself in Miss 
Tyler's own arm-chair, pressing his abominable person into 
Miss Tyler's own cushion, then passionate were her dismay 
and despair. To her favourites she was gracious and high- 
bred, regaling them with reminiscences of Lady Bateman, 
and with her views on taste, Shakspeare, and the musical 
glasses. For her little nephew she invented the pretty rec- 
reation of pricking playbills ; all capital letters were to be 
illuminated with pin-holes ; it was not a boisterous nor an 
ungenteel sport. At other times the boy would beguile 
the hours in the garden, making friends with flowers and 



l] CHILDHOOD. 7 

insects, or looking wistfully towards that sham castle on 
Claverton Hill, seat of romantic mystery, but, alas ! two 
miles away, and therefore beyond the climbing powers of 
a refined gentlewoman. Southey's hardest daily trial was 
the luxurious morning captivity of his aunt's bed ; still at 
nine, at ten that lady lay in slumber; the small urchin, 
long perked up and broad awake, feared by sound or stir 
to rouse her, and would nearly wear his little wits away in 
plotting re-arrangements of the curtain-pattern, or studying 
the motes at mazy play in the slant sunbeam. His happi- 
est season was when all other little boys were fast asleep ; 
then, splendid in his gayest " jam," he sat beside Miss Ty- 
ler in a front row of the best part of the theatre ; when the 
yawning fits had passed, he was as open-eyed as the oldest, 
and stared on, filling his soul with the spectacle, till the 
curtain fell. 

The "great red creature," Robert Southey, had now 
grown into the lean greyhound of his after-life ; his long 
legs wanted to be stirring, and there were childish ambi- 
tions already at work in his head. Freedom became dear- 
er to him than the daintiest cage, and when at six he re- 
turned to his father's house in Wine Street, it was with 
rejoicing. Now, too, his aunt issued an edict that the 
long-legged lad should be breeched ; an epoch of life was 
complete. Wine Street, with its freedom, seemed good ; 
but best of all was a visit to Grandmother Hill's pleasant 
house at Bedminster. " Here I had all wholesome liberty, 
all wholesome indulgence, all wholesome enjoyments ; and 
the delight which I there learnt to take in rural sights and 
sounds has grown up with me, and continues unabated to 
this day." And now that scrambling process called edu- 
cation was to begin. A year was spent by Southey as a 
day-scholar with old Mr. Foot, a dissenting minister, whose 



8 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

unorthodoxy as to the doctrine of the Trinity was in some 
measure compensated by sound traditional views as to the 
uses of the cane. Mr. Foot, having given proof on the 
back of his last and his least pupil of steadfastness in the 
faith according to Busby, died; and it was decided that 
the boy should be placed under Thomas Flower, who kept 
school at Corston, nine miles from Bristol. To a tender 
mother's heart nine miles seemed a breadth of severance 
cruel as an Atlantic. Mrs. Southey, born to be happy her- 
self, and to make others happy, had always heretofore met 
her son with a smile; now he found her weeping in her 
chamber ; with an effort, such as Southey, man and boy, al- 
ways knew how to make on like occasions, he gulped down 
his own rising sob, and tried to brighten her sorrow with 
a smile. 

A boy's first night at school is usually not a time of 
mirth. The heart of the solitary little lad at Corston 
sank within him. A melancholy hung abput the decayed 
mansion which had once known better days; the broken 
gateways, the summer-houses falling in ruins, the grass- 
grown court, the bleakness of the schoolroom, ill-disguised 
by its faded tapestry, depressed the spirits. Southey's pil- 
low was wet with tears before he fell asleep. The master 
was at one with his surroundings ; he, too, was a piece of 
worthy old humanity now decayed ; he, too, was falling in 
untimely ruins. From the memory of happier days, from 
the troubles of his broken fortune, from the vexations of 
the drunken maid-servant who was now his wife, he took 
refuge in contemplating the order and motions of the 
stars. " When he came into his desk, even there he was 
thinking of the stars, and looked as if he were out of hu- 
mour, not from ill-nature, but because his calculations were 
interrupted." Naturally the work of the school, such as 



i.] CHILDHOOD. 9 

it was, fell, for the most part, into the hands of Charley, 
Thomas Flower's son. Both father and son knew the 
mystery of that flamboyant penmanship admired by our 
ancestors, but Southey's handwriting had not yet advanced 
from the early rounded to the decorated style. His spell- 
ing he could look back upon with pride : on one occasion 
a grand spelling tournament between the boys took place ; 
and little Southey can hardly have failed to overthrow his 
taller adversaries with the posers, "crystallization" and 
"coterie." The household arrangements at Corston, as 
may be supposed, were not of the most perfect kind ; Mrs. 
Flower had so deep an interest in her bottle, and poor 
Thomas Flower in his planets. The boys each morning 
washed themselves, or did not, in the brook ankle -deep 
which ran through the yard. In autumn the brook grew 
deeper and more swift, and after a gale it would bring 
within bounds a tribute of floating apples from the neigh- 
bouring orchard. That was a merry day, also in autumn, 
when the boys were employed to pelt the master's walnut- 
trees ; Southey, too small to bear his part in the battery, 
would glean among the fallen leaves and twigs, inhaling 
the penetrating fragrance which ever after called up a vi- 
sion of the brook, the hillside, and its trees. One school- 
boy sport — that of " conquering " with snail-shells — seems 
to have been the special invention of Corston. The snail- 
shells, not tenantless, were pressed point against point un- 
til one was broken in. A great conqueror was prodigious- 
ly prized, was treated with honourable distinction, and was 
not exposed to danger save in great emergencies. One 
who had slain his hundreds might rank with Rodney, to 
see whom the boys had marched down to the Globe inn, 
and for whom they had cheered and waved their Sunday 

cocked hats as he passed by. So, on the whole, life at 
B 'it 



10 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

Corston had its pleasures. Chief among its pains was the 
misery of Sunday evenings in winter; then the pupils 
were assembled in the hall to hear the master read a ser- 
mon, or a portion of Stackhouse's History of the Bible. 
" Here," writes Southey, " I sat at the end of a long form, 
in sight but not within feeling of the fire, my feet cold, 
my eyelids heavy as lead, and yet not daring to close 
them — kept awake by fear alone, in total inaction, and 
under the operation of a lecture more soporific than the 
strongest sleeping dose." "While the boys' souls were 
thus provided for, there was a certain negligence in mat- 
ters unspiritual; an alarm got abroad that infection was 
among them. This hastened the downfall of the school. 
One night disputing was heard between Charley and his 
father; in the morning poor Flower was not to be seen, 
and Charley appeared with a black eye. So came to an 
end the year at Corston. Southey, aged eight, was brought 
home, and underwent " a three days' purgatory in brim- 
stone." 1 

What Southey had gained of book-lore by his two years' 
schooling was as little as could be ; but he was already a 
lover of literature after a fashion of his own. A friend of 
Miss Tyler had presented him, as soon as he could read, 
with a series of Newbery's sixpenny books for children — 
Goody Twoshoes, Giles Gingerbread, and the rest — delect- 
able histories, resplendent in Dutch-gilt paper. The true 
masters of his imagination, however, were the players and 
playwrights who provided amusement for the pleasure-lov- 
ing people of Bath. Miss Tyler was acquainted with Col- 
man, and Sheridan, and Cumberland, and Holcroft ; her talk 

1 Recollections of Corston, somewhat in the manner of Gold- 
smith's Deserted Village, will be found in Southey's early poem, The 
Retrospect. 



L] CHILDHOOD. 11 

was of actors and authors, and her nephew soon perceived 
that, honoured as were both classes, the authors were 
awarded the higher place. His first dreams of literary 
fame, accordingly, were connected with the drama. " ' It 
is the easiest thing in the world to write a play,' said I to 
Miss Palmer (a friend of Aunt Tyler's), as we were in a 
carriage on Redcliffe Hill one day, returning from Bristol 
to Bedminster. * Is it, my dear V was her reply. ' Yes,' 
I continued, ' for you know you have only to think what 
you would say if you were in the place of the characters, 
and to make them say it.' " With such a canon of dra- 
matic authorship Southey began a play on the continence 
of Scipio, and actually completed an act and a half. Shak- 
speare he read and read again ; Beaumont and Fletcher he 
had gone through before he was eight years old. Were 
they not great theatrical names, Miss Tyler reasoned, and 
therefore improving writers for her nephew ? and Southey 
had read them unharmed. When he visited his aunt from 
Corston, she was a guest with Miss Palmer at Bath ; a 
covered passage led to the playhouse, and every evening 
the delighted child, seated between the two lady-patron- 
esses of the stage, saw the pageantry and heard the poetry. 
A little later he persuaded a schoolfellow to write a trage- 
dy ; Ballard liked the suggestion, but could not invent a 
plot. Southey gave him a story; Ballard approved, but 
found a difficulty in devising names for the dramatis per- 
sonam. Southey supplied a list of heroic names : they were 
just what Ballard wanted — but he was at a loss to know 
what the characters should say. "I made the same at- 
tempt," continued Southey, "with another schoolfellow, 
and with no better success. It seemed to me very odd 
that they should not be able to write plays as well as to 
do their lessons." 



12 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

The ingenious Ballard was an ornament of the school 
of William Williams, whither Southey was sent as a day- 
boarder after the catastrophe of Corston. Under the care 
of this kindly, irascible, little, bewigged old Welshman, 
Southey remained during four years. Williams was not 
a model schoolmaster, but he was a man of character and 
of a certain humorous originality. In two things he be- 
lieved with all the energy of his nature — in his own spell- 
ing-book printed for his own school, and in the Church 
Catechism. Latin was left to the curate ; when Southey 
reached Virgil, old Williams, delighted with classical at- 
tainments rare among his pupils, thought of taking the 
boy into his own hands, but his little Latin had faded 
from his brain; and the curate himself seemed to have 
reached his term in the Tityre tu patuloe recubans sub teg- 
mine fagi, so that to Southey, driven round and round the 
pastoral paddock, the names of Tityrus and Meliboeus be- 
came for ever after symbols of ennui. No prosody was 
taught : " I am," said Southey, " at this day as liable to 
make a false quantity as any Scotchman." The credit, 
however, is due to Williams of having discovered in his 
favourite pupil a writer of English prose. One day each 
boy of a certain standing was called upon to write a letter 
on any subject he pleased: never had Southey written a 
letter except the formal one dictated at Corston which be- 
gan with "Honoured Parents." He cried for perplexity 
and vexation ; but Williams encouraged him, and present- 
ly a description of Stonehenge filled his slate. The old 
man was surprised and delighted. A less amiable feeling 
possessed Southey's schoolfellows: a plan was forthwith 
laid for his humiliation — could he tell them, fine scholar 
that he was, what the letters i. e. stand for? Southey, 



L ] CHILDHOOD. 13 

never lacking in courage, drew a bow at a venture : for 
John the Evangelist. 

The old Welshman, an original himself, had an odd fol- 
lowing of friends and poor retainers. There was the crazy 
rhymester known as " Dr. Jones ;" tradition darkly related 
that a dose of cantharides administered by waggish boys 
of a former generation had robbed him of his wits. " The 
most celebrated improvisatore was never half so vain of his 
talent as this queer creature, whose little figure of some 
five-feet-two I can perfectly call to mind, with his suit of 
rusty black, his more rusty wig, and his old cocked hat. 
Whenever he entered the schoolroom he was greeted with 
a shout of welcome." There was also Pullen, the breeches- 
maker — a glorious fellow, brimful of vulgarity, prosperity, 
and boisterous good-nature; above all, an excellent hand 
at demanding a half -holiday. A more graceful presence, 
but a more fleeting, was that of Mrs. Estan, the actress, 
who came to learn from the dancing-master her minuet de 
la cour in The Belle's Stratagem. Southey himself had 
to submit to lessons in dancing. Tom Madge, his constant 
partner, had limbs that went every way ; Southey's limbs 
would go no way : the spectacle presented by their joint 
endeavours was one designed for the pencil of Cruikshank. 
In the art of reading aloud Miss Tyler had herself instruct- 
ed her nephew, probably after the manner of the most ap- 
proved tragedy queens. The grand style did not please 
honest Williams. " Who taught you to read 2" he asked, 
scornfully. " My aunt," answered Southey. " Then give 
my compliments to your aunt, and tell her that my old 
horse, that has been dead these twenty years, could have 
taught you as well " — a message which her nephew, with 
the appalling frankness of youth, delivered, and which was 
never forgotten. 



14 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

. While Southey was at Corston, his grandmother died; 
the old lady with the large, clear, brown, bright eyes, seat- 
ed in her garden, was no more to be seen, and the Bed- 
minster house, after a brief occupation by Miss Tyler, was 
sold. Miss Tyler spoke of Bristol society with a disdain- 
ful sniff ; it was her choice to wander for a while from one 
genteel watering-place to another. When Williams gave 
Southey his first summer holidays, he visited his aunt at 
Weymouth. The hours spent there upon the beach were 
the most spiritual hours of Southey's boyhood; he was 
for the first time in face of the sea — the sea vast, voice- 
ful, and mysterious. Another epoch-making event occur- 
red about the same time ; good Mrs. Dolignon, his aunt's 
friend, gave him a book — the first which became his very 
own since that present of the toy-books of Newbery. It 
was Hoole's translation of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata ; 
in it a world of poetical adventure was opened to the boy. 
The notes to Tasso made frequent reference to Ariosto ; 
Bull's Circulating Library at Bath — a Bodleian to Southey 
— supplied him with the version, also by Hoole, of the Or- 
lando Furioso ; here was a forest of old romance in which 
to lose himself. But a greater discovery was to come ; 
searching the notes again, Southey found mention made of 
Spenser, and certain stanzas of Spenser's chief poem were 
quoted. "Was the Faerie Queene on Bull's shelves?" 
"Yes," was the answer; "they had it, but it was in obsolete 
language, and the young gentleman would not understand 
it." The young gentleman, who had already gone through 
Beaumont and Fletcher, was not daunted ; he fell to with 
the keenest relish, feeling in Spenser the presence of some- 
thing which was lacking in the monotonous couplets of 
Hoole, and charming himself unaware with the music of 



I.] CHILDHOOD. 15 

the stanza. Spenser, " not more sweet than pure, and not 
more pure than wise," 

"High-priest of all the Muses' mysteries," 3 

was henceforth accepted by Southey as his master. 

When Miss Tyler had exhausted her friends' hospitality, 
and had grown tired of lodgings, she settled in a pleasant 
suburban nook at Bristol ; but having a standing quarrel 
with Thomas Southey, her sister's brother-in-law, she would 
never set foot in the house in Wine Street, and she tried 
to estrange her nephew, as far as possible, from his natural 
home. Her own brother William, a half-witted creature, 
she brought to live with her. " The Squire," as he was 
called, was hardly a responsible being, yet he had a sort of 
half-saved shrewdness, and a memory stored with old saws, 
which, says Southey, " would have qualified him, had he 
been born two centuries earlier, to have worn motley, and 
figured with a cap and bells and a bauble in some baron's 
hall." A saying of his, " Curses are like young chickens, 
they always come home to roost," was remembered by 
Southey in after-years ; and when it was turned into Greek 
by Coleridge, to serve as motto to The Curse of Kehama, 
a mysterious reference was given — Airo^Q. Avek. tov Fv\U\. 
tov MrjT. With much beer-swilling and tobacco-chewing, 
premature old age came upon him. He would sit for 
hours by the kitchen fire, or, on warm days, in the summer- 
house, his eyes intently following the movements of the 
neighbours. He loved to play at marbles with his nephew, 
and at loo with Miss Tyler ; most of all, he loved to be 
taken to the theatre. The poor Squire had an affectionate 
heart; he would fondle children with tenderness, and at 

9 Carmen Nuptiale : Proem, 18. 



16 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

his mother's funeral his grief was overwhelming. A com- 
panion of his own age Southey found in Shadrach Weekes, 
the boy of all work, a brother of Miss Tyler's maid. Shad 
and his young master would scour the country in search 
of violet and cowslip roots, and the bee and fly orchis, un- 
til wood and rock by the side of the Avon had grown fa- 
miliar and had grown dear; and now, instead of solitary 
pricking of play-bills, Southey set to work, with the help 
of Shad, to make and fit up such a theatre for puppets as 
would have been the pride even of Wilhelm Meister. 

But fate had already pronounced that Southey was to 
be poet, and not player. Tasso and Ariosto and Spenser 
claimed him, or so he dreamed. By this time he had 
added to his epic cycle Pope's Homer and Mickle's Lu- 
siad. That prose romance, embroidered with sixteenth- 
century affectations, but with a true chivalric sentiment 
at its heart, Sidney's Arcadia, was also known to him. 
He had read Arabian and mock- Arabian tales; he had 
spent the pocket-money of many weeks on a Josephus, and 
he had picked up from Goldsmith something of Greek 
and Roman history. So breathed upon by poetry, and 
so furnished with erudition, Southey, at twelve years old, 
found it the most natural thing in the world to become an 
epic poet. His removal from the old Welshman's school 
having been hastened by that terrible message which Miss 
Tyler could not forgive, Southey, before proceeding to 
Westminster, was placed for a year under a clergyman, 
believed to be competent to carry his pupils beyond Tity- 
rus and Meliboeus. But, except some skill in writing Eng- 
lish themes, little was gained from this new tutor. The 
year, however, was not lost. "I do not remember," 
Southey writes, " in any part of my life to have been 
so conscious of intellectual improvement ... an improve- 



i.] CHILDHOOD. 11 

merit derived not from books or instruction, but from 
constantly exercising myself in English verse." "Ar- 
cadia " was the title of his first dream - poem ; it was to 
be grafted upon the Orlando Furioso, with a new hero, 
and in a new scene ; this dated from his ninth or tenth 
year, and some verses were actually composed. The epic 
of the Trojan Brutus and that of King Richard III. were 
soon laid aside, but several folio sheets of an Egbert came 
to be written. The boy's pride and ambition were soli- 
tary and shy. One day he found a lady, a visitor of Miss 
Tyler's, with the sacred sheets of Egbert in her hand ; her 
compliments on his poem were deeply resented ; and he 
determined henceforth to write his epics in a private 
cipher. Heroic epistles, translations from Latin poetry, 
satires, descriptive and moral pieces, a poem in dialogue 
exhibiting the story of the Trojan war, followed in rapid 
succession; last, a " Cassibelan," of which three books were 
completed. Southey, looking back on these attempts, 
notices their deficiency in plan, in construction. " It was 
long before I acquired this power — not fairly, indeed, 
till I was about five or six and thirty ; and it was gained 
by practice, in the course of which I learnt to perceive 
wherein I was deficient." 

One day in February, 1788, a carriage rumbled out of 
Bath, containing Miss Palmer, Miss Tyler, and Robert 
Southey, now a tall, lank boy with high-poised head, brown 
curling hair, bright hazel eyes, and an expression of ardour 
and energy about the lips and chin. The ladies were on 
their way to London for some weeks' diversion, and Rob- 
ert Southey was on his way to school at Westminster. 
For a while he remained an inconvenient appendage of 
his aunt's, wearying of the great city, longing for Shad 
and the carpentry, and the Gloucester meadows and the 
2 



IS 



SOCTHEY. 



[chap. II. 



Avon cliffs, and the honest eyes and joyous bark of poor 
Phillis. April the first — ominous morning — arrived; 
Southey was driven to Dean's Yard ; his name was duly 
entered; his boarding-house determined; his tutor cho- 
sen ; farewells were said, and he found himself in a strange 
world, alone. 



CHAPTER II. 

WESTMINSTER, OXFORD, PANTISOCRA.CY, AND MARRIAGE. 

Of Southey during his four years at Westminster we know 
little ; his fragment of autobiography, having brought him 
to the school, soon comes to an untimely close; and for 
this period we possess no letters. But we know that these 
were years which contributed much to form his intellect 
and character; we know that they were years of ardour 
and of toil ; and it is certain that now, as heretofore, his 
advance was less dependent on what pastors and masters 
did for him than on what he did for himself. The highest 
scholarship — that which unites precision with breadth, and 
linguistic science with literary feeling — Southey never at- 
tained in any foreign tongue, except perhaps in the Portu- 
guese and the Spanish. Whenever the choice lay between 
pausing to trace out a law of language, or pushing forward 
to secure a good armful of miscellaneous facts, Southey 
preferred the latter. With so many huge structures of his 
own in contemplation, he could not gather too much mate- 
rial, nor gather it too quickly. Such fortitude as goes to 
make great scholars he possessed ; his store of patience was 
inexhaustible ; but he could be patient only in pursuit of 
his proper objects. He could never learn a language in 
regular fashion ; the best grammar, he said, was always the 



20 SOTJTHEY, [chae 

shortest. Southey's acquaintance with Greek never got 
beyond that stage at which Greek, like fairy gold, is apt 
to slip away of a sudden unless kept steadfastly in view ; 
nearly all the Greek he had learnt at Westminster he for- 
got at Oxford. A monkish legend in Latin of the Church 
or a media? val Latin chronicle he could follow with the run 
of the eye ; but had he at any season of his manhood been 
called on to write a page of Latin prose, it would probably 
have resembled the French in which he sometimes sportive- 
ly addressed his friends by letter, and in which he uttered 
himself valiantly while travelling abroad. 

Southey brought to Westminster an imagination stored 
with the marvels and the beauty of old romance. He left 
it skilled in the new sentiment of the time — a sentiment 
which found in Werther and Eloisa its dialect, high-pitched, 
self-conscious, rhapsodical, and not wholly real. His bias 
for history was already marked before he entered the 
school ; but his knowledge consisted of a few clusters of 
historical facts grouped around the subjects of various pro- 
jected epics, and dotting at wide distances and almost at 
random the vast expanse of time. Now he made acquaint- 
ance with that book which, more than any other, displays 
the breadth, the variety, and the independence of the visi- 
ble lives of nations. Gibbon's Decline and Fall leaves a 
reader cold who cares only to quicken his own inmost be- 
ing by contact with what is most precious in man's spirit- 
ual history ; one chapter of Augustine's Confessions, one 
sentence of the Imitation — each a live coal from off the 
altar — will be of more worth to such an one than all the 
mass and laboured majesty of Gibbon. But one who can 
gaze with a certain impersonal regard on the spectacle of 
the world will find the Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- 
pire, more than almost any other single book, replenish and 



il] WESTMINSTER. 21 

dilate the mind. In it Southey viewed for the first time 
the sweep, the splendour, the coils, the mighty movement, 
of the stream of human affairs. 

Southey's ambition on entering Westminster was to have 
the friendship of the youths who had acted in the last 
Westminster play, and whose names he had seen in the 
newspaper. Vain hope ! for they, already preparing to tie 
their hair in tails, were looking onward to the great world, 
and had no glance to cast on the unnoted figures of the 
ander-fourth. The new-comer, according to a custom of 
the school, was for a time effaced, ceasing to exist as an in- 
dividual entity, and being known only as " shadow " of the 
senior boy chosen to be " substance " to him during his no- 
viciate. Southey accepted his effacement the more will- 
ingly because George Strachey, his substance, had a good 
face and a kindly heart ; unluckily — Strachey boarding at 
home — they were parted each night. A mild young aris- 
tocrat, joining little with the others, was head of the house ; 
and Southey, unprotected by his chief, stood exposed to 
the tyranny of a fellow-boarder bigger and brawnier than 
himself, who would souse the ears of his sleeping victim 
with water, or on occasions let fly the porter - pot or the 
poker at his head. Aspiring beyond these sallies to a 
larger and freer style of humour, he attempted one day to 
hang Southey out of an upper window by the leg ; the 
pleasantry was taken ill by the smaller boy, who offered 
an effectual resistance, and soon obtained his remove to an- 
other chamber. Southey's mature judgment of boarding- 
school life was not, on the whole, favourable ; yet to West- 
minster he owed two of his best and dearest possessions — 
the friendship of C. W. W. Wynn, whose generous loyalty 
alone made it possible for Southey to pursue literature as 
his profession, and the friendship, no less precious, of Gros- 



22 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

venor Bedford, lasting green and fresh from boyhood until 
both were white-haired, venerable men. 

Southey's interest in boyish sports was too slight to 
beguile him from the solitude needful for the growth of 
a poet's mind. He had thoughts of continuing Ovid's 
Metamorphoses; he planned six books to complete the 
Faery Queen, and actually wrote some cantos ; already the 
subject of Madoc was chosen. And now a gigantic con- 
ception, which at a later time was to bear fruit in such 
poems as Thalaba and ITehama, formed itself in his mind. 
"When I was a schoolboy at Westminster," he writes, 
" I frequented the house of a schoolfellow who has con- 
tinued till this day to be one of my most intimate and 
dearest friends. The house was so near Dean's Yard that 
it was hardly considered as being out of our prescribed 
bounds ; and I had free access to the library, a well-stored 
and pleasant room . . . looking over the river. There 
many of my truant hours were delightfully spent in read- 
ing Picart's Religious Ceremonies. The book impressed 
my imagination strongly ; and before I left school I had 
formed the intention of exhibiting all the more prominent 
and poetical forms of mythology, which have at any time 
obtained among mankind, by making each the ground- 
work of an heroic poem." Southey's huge design was 
begotten upon his pia mater by a folio in a library. A 
few years earlier Wordsworth, a boy of fourteen, walking 
between Hawkshead and Ambleside, noticed the boughs 
and leaves of an oak-tree intensely outlined in black against 
a bright western sky. " That moment," he says, " was 
important in my poetical history, for I date from it my 
consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances 
which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or 
country, so far as I was acquainted with them ; and I 



n.] WESTMINSTER. 23 

made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency." 
Two remarkable incidents in the history of English poetry, 
and each with something in it of a typical character. 

At "Westminster Southey obtained his first literary prof* 
its — the guerdon of the silver penny to which Cowper al- 
ludes in his Table- Talk. Southey 's penny — exchanged 
for current coin in the proportion of six to one by the 
mistress of the boarding-house — was always awarded for 
English composition. But his fame among his schoolfel- 
lows was not of an early or sudden growth. In the year 
of Southey's entrance, some of the senior boys commenced 
a weekly paper called The Trifler. It imitates, with some 
skill, the periodical essay of the post-Johnsonian period : 
there is the wide-ranging discussion on the Influence of 
Liberty on Genius ; there is the sprightly sketch of Amelia, 
a learned Lady ; there is the moral diatribe on Deists, a 
Sect of Infidels most dangerous to Mankind ; there are the 
letters from Numa and from Infelix ; there is the Eastern 
apologue, beginning, " In the city of Bassora lived Zaydor, 
the son of Al-Zored." Southey lost no time in sending 
to the editor his latest verses ; a baby sister, Margaretta, 
had just died, and Southey expressed in elegy a grief which 
was real and keen. " The Elegy signed B. is received " — 
so Mr. Timothy Touchstone announced on the Saturday 
after the manuscript had been dropped into the penny 
post. The following Saturday — anxiously expected — 
brought no poem, but another announcement : " The El- 
egy by B. must undergo some Alterations; a Liberty I 
must request all my Correspondents to permit me to take." 
" After this," says Southey, " I looked for its appearance 
anxiously, but in vain." Happily no one sought to dis- 
cover B., or supposed that he was one with the curly-head- 
ed boy of the under-fourth. 



24 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

If authorship has its hours of disappointment, it has 
compensating moments of glory and of joy. The Trifler, 
having lived to the age of ten months, deceased. In 1792 
Southey, now a great boy, with Strachey, his sometime 
" substance," and his friends Wynn and Bedford, planned 
a new periodical of ill-omened name, The Flagellant. " I 
well remember my feelings," he writes, " when the first 
number appeared. ... It was Bedford's writing, but that 
circumstance did not prevent me from feeling that I was 
that day borne into the world as an author ; and if ever 
my head touched the stars while I walked upon the earth, 
it was then. ... In all London there was not so vain, so 
happy, so elated a creature as I was that day." From that 
starry altitude he soon descended. The subject of an 
early number of The Flagellant was flogging ; the writer 
was Robert Southey. He was full of Gibbon at the time, 
and had caught some of Voltaire's manner of poignant 
irony. Rather for disport of his wits than in the charac- 
ter of a reformer, the writer of number five undertook to 
prove from the ancients and the Fathers that flogging was 
an invention of the devil. During Southey's life the devil 
received many insults at his hands ; his horns, his hoofs, 
his teeth, his tail, his moral character, were painfully re- 
ferred to ; and the devil took it, like a sensible fiend, in 
good part. Not so Dr. Vincent ; the preceptorial dignity 
was impugned by some unmannerly brat; a bulwark of 
the British Constitution was at stake. Dr. Vincent made 
haste to prosecute the publisher for libel. Matters having 
taken unexpectedly so serious a turn, Southey came for- 
ward, avowed himself the writer, and, with some sense of 
shame in yielding to resentment so unwarranted and so 
dull, he offered his apology. The head-master's wrath still 
held on its way, and Southey was privately expelled. 



n.] WESTMINSTER. 25 

All Southey's truant hours were not passed among folioa 
adorned with strange sculptures. In those days even St. 
Peter's College, Westminster, could be no little landlocked 
bay — silent, secure, and dull. To be in London was to be 
among the tides and breakers of the world. Every post 
brought news of some startling or significant event. Now 
it was that George Washington had been elected first Pres- 
ident of the American Republic ; now that the States-Gen- 
eral were assembled at Versailles ; now that Paris, deliv- 
ered from her nightmare towers of the Bastille, breathed 
free; now that Brissot was petitioning for dethronement. 
The main issues of the time were such as to try the spirits. 
Southey, who was aspiring, hopeful, and courageous, did 
not hesitate in choosing a side ; a new dawn was opening 
for the world, and should not his heart have its portion 
in that dawn ? 

The love of our own household which surrounds us like 
the air, and which seems inevitable as our daily meat and 
drink, acquires a strange preciousness when we find that 
the world can be harsh. The expelled Westminster boy 
returned to Bristol, and faithful Aunt Tyler welcomed him 
home ; Shad did not avert his face, and Phillis looked up 
at him with her soft spaniel eyes. But Bristol also had 
its troubles; the world had been too strong for the poor 
linen-draper in Wine Street ; he had struggled to maintain 
his business, but without success ; his fortune was now 
broken, and his heart broke with it. In some respects it 
was well for Southey that his father's affairs gave him def- 
inite realities to attend to ; for, in the quiet and vacancy of 
the days in Miss Tyler's house, his heart took unusual heats 
and chills, and even his eager verse- writing could not allay 
the excitement nor avert the despondent fit. When Mich- 
aelmas came, Southey went up to Oxford to matriculate; 
C 2* 3 



26 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

it was intended that he should enter at Christ Church, but 
the dean had heard of the escapade at Westminster ; there 
was a laying of big-wigs together over that adventure, and 
the young rebel was rejected ; to be received, however, by 
Balliol College. But to Southey it mattered little at the 
time whether he were of this college or of that ; a sum- 
mons had reached him to hasten to Bristol that he might 
follow his father's body to the grave, and now his thoughts 
could not but cling to his mother in her sorrow and her 
need. 

" I left "Westminster," says Southey, " in a perilous state 
— a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rous- 
seau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by 
Gibbon : many circumstances tended to give me a wrong 
bias, none to lead me right, except adversity, the whole- 
somest of all discipline." The young republican went up 
to chambers in Rat Castle — since departed — near the head 
of Balliol Grove, prepared to find in Oxford the seat of 
pedantry, prejudice, and aristocracy ; an airy sense of his 
own enlightenment and emancipation possessed him. He 
has to learn to pay respect to men " remarkable only for 
great wigs and little wisdom." He finds it "rather dis- 
graceful at the moment when Europe is on fire with free- 
dom — when man and monarch are contending — to sit and 
study Euclid and Hugo Grotius." Beside the enthusiasm 
proper in Southey' s nature, there was at this time an. en- 
thusiasm prepense. He had learnt from his foreign masters 
the language of hyper -sensibility; his temperament was 
nervous and easily wrought upon ; his spirit was generous 
and ardent. Like other youths with a facile literary talent 
before rinding his true self, he created a number of artificial 
selves, who uttered for him his moralizings and philoso- 
phizings, who declaimed for him on liberty, who dictated 



n.] OXFORD. 27 

long letters of sentimental platitudes, and who built up 
dream -fabrics of social and political reforms, chiefly for 
the pleasure of seeing how things might look in " the brill- 
iant colours of fancy, nature, and Rousseau." In this there 
was no insincerity, though there was some unreality. " For 
life," he says, " I have really a very strong predilection," 
and the buoyant energy within him delayed the discovery 
of the bare facts of existence; it was so easy and enjoy- 
able to become in turn sage, reformer, and enthusiast. Or 
perhaps we ought to say that all this time there was a real 
Robert Southey, strong, upright, ardent, simple; and al- 
though this was quite too plain a person to serve the pur- 
poses of epistolary literature, it was he who gave their cues 
to the various ideal personages. This, at least, may be af- 
firmed — all Southey's unrealities were of a pure and gener- 
ous cast ; never was his life emptied of truth and meaning, 
and made in the deepest degree phantasmal by a secret 
shame lurking under a fair show. The youth Milton, with 
his grave upbringing, was happily not in the way of catch- 
ing the trick of sentimental phrases; but even Milton at 
Cambridge, the lady of his College, was not more clean 
from spot or blemish than was Southey amid the vulgar 
riot and animalisms of young Oxford. 

Two influences came to the aid of Southey's instinctive 
modesty, and confirmed him in all that was good. One 
was his friendship with Edmund Seward, too soon taken 
from him by death. The other was his discipleship to a 
great master of conduct. One in our own day has acknowl- 
edged the largeness of his debt to 

" That halting slave, who in Nicopolis 
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son 
Clear'd Rome of what most shamed him." 

3 



28 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

Epictetus came to Southey precisely when such a master 
was needed ; other writers had affected him through his 
imagination, through his nervous sensibility ; they had 
raised around him a luminous haze; they had plunged 
him deeper in illusion. Now was heard the voice of a 
conscience speaking to a conscience ; the manner of speech 
was grave, unfigured, calm ; above all, it was real, and the 
words bore in upon the hearer's soul with a quiet resist- 
lessness. He had allowed his sensitiveness to set up what 
excitements it might please in his whole moral frame ; he 
had been squandering his emotions ; he had been indulg- 
ing in a luxury and waste of passion. Here was a tonic 
and a styptic. Had Southey been declamatory about 
freedom? The bondsman Epictetus spoke of freedom 
also, and of how it might be obtained. Epictetus, like 
Rousseau, told of a life according to nature ; he commend- 
ed simplicity of manners. But Rousseau's simplicity, not- 
withstanding that homage which he paid to the will, seem- 
ed to heat the atmosphere with strange passion, seemed 
to give rise to new curiosities and refinements of self-con- 
scious emotion. Epictetus showed how life could be sim- 
plified, indeed, by bringing it into obedience to a perfect 
law. Instead of a quietism haunted by feverish dreams 
— duty, action, co-operation with God. "Twelve years 
ago," wrote Southey in 1806, "I carried Epictetus in my 
pocket till my very heart was ingrained with it, as a pig's 
bones become red by feeding him upon madder. And 
the longer I live, and the more I learn, the more am I con- 
vinced that Stoicism, properly understood, is the best and 
noblest of systems." Much that Southey gained from 
Stoicism he kept throughout his whole life, tempered, in- 
deed, by the influences of a Christian faith, but not lost. 
He was no metaphysician, and a master who had placed 



il] OXFORD. 29 

metaphysics first and morals after would hardly have won 
him for a disciple ; but a lofty ethical doctrine spoke to 
what was deepest and most real in his nature. To trust 
in an over-ruling Providence, to accept the disposal of 
events not in our own power with a strenuous loyalty to 
our Supreme Ruler, to hold loose by all earthly possessions 
even the dearest, to hold loose by life itself while putting 
it to fullest use — these lessons he first learnt from the 
Stoic slave, and he forgot none of them. But his chief 
lesson was the large one of self -regulation, that it is a 
man's prerogative to apply the reason and the will to the 
government of conduct and to the formation of character. 
By the routine of lectures and examinations Southey 
profited little; he was not driven into active revolt, and 
that was all. His tutor, half a democrat, surprised him by 
praising America, and asserting the right of every country 
to model its own forms of government. He added, with 
a pleasing frankness which deserves to be imitated, " Mr. 
Southey, you won't learn anything by my lectures, sir ; so, 
if you have any studies of your own, you had better pur- 
sue them." Of all the months of his life, those passed 
at Oxford, Southey declared, were the most unprofitable. 
"All I learnt was a little swimming . . . and a little boat- 
ing. ... I never remember to have dreamt of Oxford — a 
sure proof how little it entered into my moral being ; of 
school, on the contrary, I dream perpetually." The mis- 
cellaneous society of workers, idlers, dunces, bucks, men of 
muscle and men of money, did not please him ; he lacked 
what Wordsworth calls "the congregating temper that 
pervades our unripe years." One or two friends he chose, 
and grappled them to his heart ; above all, Seward, who 
abridged his hours of sleep for sake of study — whose 
drink was water, whose breakfast was dry bread ; then, 



80 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

Wynn and Lightfoot. With Seward he sallied forth, in 
the Easter vacation, 1793, for a holiday excursion; passed, 
with " the stupidity of a democratic philosopher," the very 
walls of Blenheim, without turning from the road to view 
the ducal palace; lingered at Evesham, and wandered 
through its ruined Abbey, indulging in some passable me- 
diaeval romancing ; reached Worcester and Kidderminster. 
" We returned by Bewdley. There is an old mansion, once 
Lord Herbert's, now mouldering away, in so romantic a 
situation, that I soon lost myself in dreams of days of 
yore: the tapestried room — the listed fight — the vassal- 
filled hall — the hospitable fire — the old baron and his 
young daughter — these formed a most delightful day- 
dream." The youthful democrat did not suspect that 
such day-dreams were treasonable — a hazardous caressing 
of the wily enchantress of the past ; in his pocket he car- 
ried Milton's Defence, which may have been his amulet of 
salvation. Many and various elements could mingle in 
young brains a -seethe with revolution and romanticism. 
The fresh air and quickened blood at least put Southey 
into excellent spirits. " We must walk over Scotland ; it 
will be an adventure to delight us all the remainder of 
our lives : we will wander over the hills of Morven, and 
mark the driving blast, perchance bestrodden by the spirit 
of Ossian !" 

Among visitors to the Wye, in July, 1793, were William 
Wordsworth, recently returned from France, and Robert 
Southey, holiday - making from Oxford ; they were prob- 
ably unacquainted with each other at that time even by 
name. Wordsworth has left an undying memorial of his 
tour in the poem written near Tintern Abbey, five years 
later. Southey was drawing a long breath before he ut- 
tered himself in some thousands of blank verses. The 



n.] OXFORD. 31 

father of his friend Bedford resided at Brixton Cause- 
way, about four miles on the Surrey side of London ; the 
smoke of the great city hung heavily beyond an interven- 
ing breadth of country ; shady lanes led to the neighbour- 
ing villages ; the garden was a sunny solitude where flow- 
ers opened and fruit grew mellow, and bees and birds were 
happy. Here Southey visited his friend; his nineteenth 
birthday came ; on the following morning he planted him- 
self at the desk in the garden summer-house; morning 
after morning quickly passed ; and by the end of six 
weeks Joan of Arc, an epic poem in twelve books, was 
written. To the subject Southey was attracted primarily 
by the exalted character of his heroine; but apart from 
this it possessed a twofold interest for him : England, in 
1793, was engaged in a war against France — a war hateful 
to all who sympathized with the Republic ; Southey's epic 
was a celebration of the glories of French patriotism, a 
narrative of victory over the invader. It was also chival- 
ric and mediaeval ; the sentiment which was transforming 
the word Gothic, from a term of reproach to a word of 
vague yet mastering fascination, found expression in the 
young poet's treatment of the story of Joan of Arc. 
Knight and hermit, prince and prelate, doctors seraphic 
and irrefragable with their pupils, meet in it ; the castle 
and the cathedral confront one another: windows gleam 
with many-coloured light streaming through the rich robes 
of saint and prophet ; a miracle of carven tracery branches 
overhead ; upon the altar burns the mystic lamp. 

The rough draft of Joan was hardly laid aside when 
Southey's sympathies with the revolutionary movement 
in France, strained already to the utmost point of tension, 
were fatally rent. All his faith, all his hope, were given 
to the Girondin party; and from the Girondins he had 



32 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

singled out Brissot as his ideal of political courage, purity, 
and wisdom. Brissot, like himself, was a disciple of Jean 
Jacques ; his life was austere ; he had suffered on behalf 
of freedom. On the day when the Bastille was stormed, 
its keys were placed in Brissot' s hands; it was Brissot 
who had determined that war should be declared against 
the foreign foes of the Republic. But now the Girondins 
. — following hard upon Marie Antoinette — were in the 
death-carts ; they chanted their last hymn of liberty, ever 
growing fainter while the axe lopped head after head ; and 
Brissot was among the martyrs (October 31, 1*793). Prob- 
ably no other public event so deeply affected Southey. " I 
am sick of the world," he writes, " and discontented with 
every one in it. The murder of Brissot has completely 
harrowed up my faculties. ... I look round the world, 
and everywhere find the same spectacle — the strong tyr- 
annizing over the weak, man and beast. . . . There is no 
place for virtue." 

After this, though Southey did not lose faith in demo- 
cratic principles, he averted his eyes for a time from 
France : how could he look to butchers who had shed 
blood which was the very life of liberty, for the reali- 
zation of his dreams ? And whither should he look ? 
Had he but ten thousand republicans like himself, they 
might repeople Greece and expel the Turk. Being but 
one, might not Cowley's fancy, a cottage in America, be 
transformed into a fact : " three rooms . . . and my only 
companion some poor negro whom I have bought on pur- 
pose to emancipate ?" Meanwhile he occupied a room in 
Aunt Tyler's house, and, instead of swinging the axe in 
some forest primeval, amused himself with splitting a 
wedge of oak in company with Shad, who might, perhaps, 
serve for the emancipated negro. Moreover, he was very 



il] OXFORD. 33 

diligently driving his quill : " I have finished transcribing 
Joan, and have bound her in marble paper with green rib- 
bons, and am now copying all my remainables to carry to 
Oxford. Then once more a clear field, and then another 
epic poem, and then another." Appalling announcement ! 
" I have accomplished a most arduous task, transcribing 
all my verses that appear worth the trouble, except let- 
ters. Of these I took one list — another of my pile of stuff 
and nonsense — and a third of what I have burnt and 
lost; upon an average 10,000 verses are burnt and lost; 
the same number preserved, and 15,000 worthless." Such 
sad mechanic exercise dulled the ache in Southey's heart ; 
still " the visions of futurity," he finds, " are dark and 
gloomy, and the only ray that enlivens the scene beams 
on America." 

To Balliol Southey returned ; and if the future of the 
world seemed perplexing, so also did his individual future. 
His school and college expenses were borne by Mrs. South- 
ey's brother, the Rev. Herbert Hill, chaplain to the British 
Factory at Lisbon. In him the fatherless youth found one 
who was both a friend and a father. Holbein's portrait 
of Sir Thomas More in his best years might have passed 
for that of Mr. Hill ; there was the same benign thought- 
fulness in his aspect, the same earnest calm, the same 
brightness and quietness, the same serene and cheerful 
strength. He was generous and judicious, learned and 
modest, and his goodness carried authority with it. Uncle 
Hill's plan had been that Southey, like himself, should be- 
come an English clergyman. But though he might have 
preached from an Unitarian pulpit, Southey could not take 
upon himself the vows of a minister of the Church of 
England. It would have instantly relieved his mother had 
he entered into orders. He longed that this were possible, 



34 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

and went through many conflicts of mind, and not a little 
anguish. " God knows I would exchange every intellectu- 
al gift which He has blessed me with, for implicit faith to 
have been able to do this ;" but it could not be. To bear 
the reproaches, gentle yet grave, of his uncle was hard ; to 
grieve his mother was harder. Southey resolved to go to 
the anatomy school, and fit himself to be a doctor. But 
he could not overcome his strong repugnance to the dis- 
secting-room ; it expelled him whether he would or no; 
and all the time literature, with still yet audible voice, was 
summoning him. Might he not obtain some official em- 
ployment in London, and also pursue his true calling? 
Beside the desire of pleasing his uncle and of aiding his 
mother, the Stoic of twenty had now a stronger motive 
for seeking some immediate livelihood. " I shall joyfully 
bid adieu to Oxford," he writes, "... and, when I know 
my situation, unite myself to a woman whom I have long 
esteemed as a sister, and for whom I now indulge a warm- 
er sentiment." But Southey's reputation as a dangerous 
Jacobin stood in his way ; how could his Oxford overseers 
answer for the good behaviour of a youth who spoke 
scornfully of Pitt ? 

The shuttles of the fates now began to fly faster, and 
the threads to twist and twine. It was June of the year 
1794. A visitor from Cambridge was one day introduced 
to Southey ; he seemed to be of an age near his own ; his 
hair, parted in the middle, fell wavy upon his neck ; his face, 
when the brooding cloud was not upon him, was bright 
with an abundant promise — a promise vaguely told in 
lines of the sweet full lips, in the luminous eyes, and the 
^prehead that was like a god's. This meeting of Southey 
and Coleridge was an event which decided much in the 
careers of both. In the summer days and in youth, the 



ii.] PANTISOCRACY. 35 

meeting-time of spirits, they were drawn close to one an- 
other. Both had confessions to make, with many points 
in common ; both were poets ; both were democrats ; both 
had hoped largely from France, and the hopes of both had 
been darkened ; both were uncertain what part to take in 
life. We do not know whether Coleridge quickly grew 
so confidential as to tell of his recent adventure as Silas 
Titus Comberbatch of the 15th Light Dragoons. But we 
know that Coleridge had a lively admiration for the tall 
Oxford student— a person of distinction, so dignified, so 
courteous, so quick of apprehension, so full of knowledge, 
with a glance so rapid and piercing, with a smile so good 
and kind. And we know that Coleridge lost no time in 
communicating to Southey the hopes that were nearest to 
his heart. 

Pantisocracy, word of magic, summed up these hopes. 
"Was it not possible for a number of men like themselves, 
whose way of thinking was liberal, whose characters were 
tried and incorruptible, to join together and leave this old 
world of falling thrones and rival anarchies, for the woods 
and wilds of the young republic ? One could wield an 
axe, another could guide a plough. Their wants would be 
simple and natural ; their toil need not be such as the 
slaves of luxury endure ; where possessions were held in 
common, each would work for all ; in their cottages the 
best books would have a place ; literature and science, 
bathed anew in the invigorating stream of life and nature, 
could not but rise reanimated and purified. Each young 
man should take to himself a mild and lovely woman for 
his wife ; it would be her part to prepare their innocent 
food, and tend their hardy and beautiful race. So they 
would bring back the patriarchal age, and in the sober 
evening of life they would behold "colonies of indepen- 



86 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

dence in the undivided dale of industry." All the argu- 
ments in favour of such a scheme could not be set forth 
in a conversation, but Coleridge, to silence objectors, would 
publish a quarto volume on Pantisocracy and Aspheterism. 

Southey heartily assented ; his own thoughts had, with 
a vague forefeeling, been pointing to America; the un- 
published epic would serve to buy a spade, a plough, a few 
acres of ground ; he could assuredly split timber ; he knew 
a mild and lovely woman for whom he indulged a warmer 
sentiment than that of a brother. Robert Lovell, a Quak- 
er, an enthusiast, a poet, married to the sister of Southey's 
Edith, would surely join them ; so would Burnett, his col- 
lege friend ; so, perhaps, would the admirable Seward. The 
long vacation was at hand. Being unable to take orders, 
or to endure the horrors of the dissecting-room, Southey 
must no longer remain a burden upon his uncle ; he would 
quit the university and prepare for the voyage. 

Coleridge departed to tramp it through the romantic val- 
leys and mountains of Wales. Southey joined his moth- 
er, who now lived at Bath, and her he soon persuaded — 
as a handsome and eloquent son can persuade a loving 
mother — that the plan of emigration was feasible; she 
even consented to accompany her boy. But his aunt — 
an esprit borne — was not to hear a breath of Pantisocracy ; 
still less would it be prudent to confess to her his engage- 
ment to Miss Edith Fricker. His Edith was penniless, 
and therefore all the dearer to Southey; her father had 
been an unsuccessful manufacturer of sugar -pans. What 
would Miss Tyler, the friend of Lady Bateman, feel? 
What words, what gestures, what acts, would give her feel- 
ings relief ? 

When Coleridge, after his Welsh wanderings, arrived in 
Bristol, he was introduced to Lovell, to Mrs. Lovell, to Mrs. 



il] PANTISOCRACY. 3? 

Lovell's sisters, Edith and Sarah, and Martha and Elizabeth. 
Mrs. Lovell was doubtless already a pantisocrat ; Southey 
had probably not found it difficult to convert Edith ; Sarah, 
the elder sister, who was wont to look a mild reproof on 
over-daring speculations, seriously inclined to hear of pan- 
tisocracy from the lips of Coleridge. All members of the 
community were to be married. Coleridge now more than 
ever saw the propriety of that rule; he was prepared to 
yield obedience to it with the least possible delay. Bur- 
nett, also a pantisocrat, must also marry. Would Miss 
Martha Fricker join the community as Mrs. George Bur- 
nett ? The lively little woman refused him scornfully ; if 
he wanted a wife in a hurry, let him go elsewhere. The 
prospects of the reformers, this misadventure notwithstand- 
ing, from day to day grew brighter. " This Pantisocratic 
scheme,'* so writes Southey, " has given me new life, new 
hope, new energy ; all the faculties of my mind are dilated." 
Coleridge met a friend of Priestley's. But a few days 
since he had toasted the great doctor at Bala, thereby call- 
ing forth a sentiment from the loyal parish apothecary : " I 
gives a sentiment, gemmen ! May all republicans be gullo- 
teened !" The friend of Priestley's said that without doubt 
the doctor would join them. An American land-agent told 
them that for twelve men 2000J. would do. " He recom- 
mends the Susquehanna, from its excessive beauty and its 
security from hostile Indians." The very name — Susque- 
hanna — sounded as if it were the sweetest of rippling riv- 
ers. Money, it is true, as Southey admits, " is a huge evil ;" 
but now they are twenty-seven, and by resolute men this 
difficulty can be overcome. 

It was evening of the 17th of October, a dark and gusty 
evening of falling rain and miry ways. Within Aunt Ty- 
ler's house in College Green, Bristol, a storm was burst- 



38 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

ing ; she had heard it all at last — Pantisocracy, America, 
Miss Fricker. Out of the house he must march; there 
was the door; let her never see his face again. Southey 
took his hat, looked for the last time in his life at his aunt, 
then stepped out into the darkness and the rain. " Why, 
sir, you ben't going to Bath at this time of night and in 
this weather ?" remonstrated poor Shadrach. Even so ; and 
with a friendly whisper master and man parted. Southey 
had not a penny in his pocket, and was lightly clad. At 
Lovell's he luckily found his father's great-coat; he swal- 
lowed a glass of brandy and set off on foot. Misery makes 
one acquainted with strange road-fellows. On the way he 
came upon an old man, drunk, and hardly able to stumble 
forward through the night : the young pantisocrat, mind- 
ful of his fellow-man, dragged him along nine miles amid 
rain and mire. Then, with weary feet, he reached Bath, 
and there was his mother to greet him with surprise, and 
to ask for explanations. " Oh, Patience, Patience, thou 
hast often helped poor Robert Southey, but never didst 
thou stand him in more need than on Friday, the 17th of 
October, 1794." 

For a little longer the bow of hope shone in the West, 
somewhere over the Susquehanna, and then it gradually 
grew faint and faded. Money, that huge evil, sneered its 
cold negations. The chiefs consulted, and Southey pro- 
posed that a house and farm should be taken in Wales, 
where their principles might be acted out until better days 
enabled them to start upon their voyage. One pantisocrat, 
at least, could be happy with Edith, brown bread, and wild 
Welsh raspberries. But Coleridge objected ; their princi- 
ples could not be fairly tested under the disadvantage of 
an effete and adverse social state surrounding them; be- 
sides, where was the purchase-money to come from ? how 



ii.] PANTISOCRACY. 39 

were they to live until the gathering of their first crops? 
It became clear that the realization of their plan must be 
postponed. The immediate problem was, How to raise 
1 50/. ? With such a sum they might both qualify by mar- 
riage for membership in the pantisocratical community. 
After that, the rest would somehow follow. 

How, then, to raise 150/. ? Might they not start a new 
magazine and become joint editors? The Telegraph had 
offered employment to Southey. "Hireling writer to a 
newspaper! 'Sdeath! 'tis an ugly title; but n'importe. 
I shall write truth, and only truth." The offer, however, 
turned out to be that of a reporter's place; and his trou- 
blesome guest, honesty, prevented his contributing to The 
True Briton. But he and Coleridge could at least write 
poetry, and perhaps publish it with advantage to them- 
selves ; and they could lecture to a Bristol audience. With 
some skirmishing lectures on various political subjects of 
immediate interest, Coleridge began ; many came to hear 
them, and the applause was loud. Thus encouraged, he 
announced and delivered two remarkable courses of lect- 
ures — one, A Comparative View of the English Rebellion 
under Charles I. and the .French Revolution; the other, 
On Revealed Religion: its Corruptions and its Political 
Views. Southey did not feel tempted to discuss the origin 
of evil or the principles of revolution. He chose as his 
subject a view of the course of European history from 
Solon and Lycurgus to the American War. His hearers 
were pleased by the graceful delivery and unassuming self- 
possession of the young lecturer, and were quick to recog- 
nize the unusual range of his knowledge, his just perception 
of facts, his ardour and energy of conviction. One lecture 
Coleridge begged permission to deliver in Southey's place 
— that on the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Roman 



40 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

Empire. Southey consented, and the room was thronged ; 
but no lecturer appeared; they waited; still no lecturer. 
Southey offered an apology, and the crowd dispersed in no 
happy temper. It is likely, adds that good old gossip Cot- 
tle, who tells the story, " that at this very moment Mr. 
Coleridge might have been found at No. 48 College Street, 
composedly smoking his pipe, and lost in profound musings 
on his divine Susquehanna." 

The good Cottle — young in 1795, a publisher, and un- 
happily a poet — rendered more important service to the 
two young men than that of smoothing down their ruffled 
tempers after this incident. Southey, in conjunction with 
Lovell, had already published a slender volume of verse. 
The pieces by Southey recall his schoolboy joys and sor- 
rows, and tell of his mother's tears, his father's death, his 
friendship with (i Urban," his love of "Ariste," lovely 
maid ! his delight in old romance, his discipleship to Rous- 
seau. They are chiefly of interest as exhibiting the diverse 
literary influences to which a young writer of genius was 
exposed in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Here 
the couplet of Pope reappears, and hard by the irregular 
ode as practised by Akenside, the elegy as written by Gray, 
the unrhymed stanza which Collins's Evening made a fash- 
ion, the sonnet to which Bowles had lent a meditative grace, 
and the rhymeless measures imitated by Southey from 
Sayers, and afterwards made popular by his Thalaba. On 
the last page of this volume appear " Proposals for pub- 
lishing by subscription Joan of Arc;" but subscriptions 
came slowly in. One evening Southey read for Cottle 
some books of Joan. " It can rarely happen," he writes, 
" that a young author should meet with a bookseller as in- 
experienced and as ardent as himself." Cottle offered to 
publish the poem in quarto, to make it the handsomest 



n.] PANTISOCRACY. 41 

book ever printed in Bristol, to give the author fifty copies 
for his subscribers, and fifty pounds to put forthwith into 
his purse. Some dramatic attempts had recently been 
made by Southey, Wat Tyler, of which we shall hear 
more at a later date, and the Fall of Robespierre, under- 
taken by Coleridge, Lovell, and Southey, half in sport — 
each being pledged to produce an act in twenty -four 
hours. These were now forgotten, and all his energies 
were given to revising and in part recasting Joan. In 
six weeks his epic had been written ; its revision occupied 
six months. 

With summer came a great sorrow, and in the end of 
autumn a measureless joy. " He is dead," Southey writes, 
" my dear Edmund Seward ! after six weeks' suffering. . . . 
You know not, Grosvenor, how I loved poor Edmund : he 
taught me all that I have of good. . . . There is a strange 
vacancy in my heart. ... I have lost a friend, and such 
a one!" And then characteristically come the words: 
" I will try, by assiduous employment, to get rid of very 
melancholy thoughts." Another consolation Southey pos- 
sessed : during his whole life he steadfastly believed that 
death is but the removal of a spirit from earth to heaven ; 
and heaven for him meant a place where cheerful famil- 
iarity was natural, where, perhaps, he himself would write 
more epics and purchase more folios. As Baxter expected 
to meet among the saints above Mr. Hampden and Mr. Pym, 
so Southey counted upon the pleasure of having long talks 
with friends, of obtaining introductions to eminent stran- 
gers ; above all, he looked forward to the joy of again em- 
bracing his beloved ones : 

" Often together have we talked of death ; 
How sweet it were to see 
All doubtful things made clear ; 
D 3 4 



42 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

How sweet it were with powers 

Such as the Cherubim 
To view the depth of Heaven ! 

O Edmund ! thou hast first 
Begun the travel of eternity." 

Autumn brought its happiness pure and deep. Mr. Hill 
had arrived from Lisbon ; once again he urged his nephew 
to enter the church ; but for one of Southey's opinions the 
church-gate " is perjury," nor does he even find church-go- 
ing the best mode of spending his Sunday. He proposed 
to choose the law as his profession. But his uncle had 
heard of Pantisocracy, Aspheterism, and Miss Fricker, and 
said the law could wait ; he should go abroad for six months, 
see Spain and Portugal, learn foreign languages, read for- 
eign poetry and history, rummage among the books and 
manuscripts his uncle had collected in Lisbon, and after- 
wards return to his Blackstone. Southey, straightforward 
in all else, in love became a Machiavel. To Spain and 
Portugal he would go ; his mother wished it ; Cottle ex- 
pected from him a volume of travels ; his uncle had but 
to name the day. Then he sought Edith, and asked her 
to promise that before he departed she would become his 
wife : she wept to think that he was going, and yet per- 
suaded him to go ; consented, finally, to all that he pro- 
posed. But how was he to pay the marriage fees and buy 
the wedding-ring ? Often this autumn he had walked the 
streets dinnerless, no pence in his pocket, no bread and 
cheese at his lodgings, thinking little, however, of dinner, 
for his head was full of poetry and his heart of love. Cot- 
tle lent him money for the ring and the license — and 
Southey in after -years never forgot the kindness of his 
honest friend. He was to accompany his uncle, but Edith 
was first to be his own; so she may honourably accept 



ii.] MARRIAGE. 43 

from him whatever means he can furnish for her support. 
It was arranged with Cottle's sisters that she should live 
with them, and still call herself by her maiden name. On 
the morning of the 14th of November, 1*795 — a day sad, 
yet with happiness underlying all sadness — Robert Southey 
was married in Redcliffe Church, Bristol, to Edith Fricker. 
At the church door there was a pressure of hands, and they 
parted with full hearts, silently — Mrs. Southey to take up 
her abode in Bristol, with the wedding-ring upon her breast, 
her husband to cross the sea. Never did woman put her 
happiness in more loyal keeping. 

So by love and by poetry, by Edith Fricker and by 
Joan of Arc, Southey's life was being shaped. Powers 
most benign leaned forward to brood over the coming 
years and to bless them. It was decreed that his heart 
should be no homeless wanderer ; that, as seasons went by, 
children should be in his arms and upon his knees : it was 
also decreed that he should become a strong toiler among 
books. Now Pantisocracy looked faint and far ; the facts 
plain and enduring of the actual world took hold of hi? 
adult spirit. And Coleridge complained of this, and did 
not come to bid his friend farewell. 



CHAPTER III. 

WANDERINGS, 1795 — 1803. 

Through pastoral Somerset, through Devon amid falling- 
leaves, then over rough Cornish roads, the coach brought 
Southey — cold, hungry, and dispirited — to Falmouth. No 
packet there for Corunna ; no packet starting before De- 
cember 1st. The gap of time looked colourless and dreary, 
nor could even the philosophy of Epictetus lift him quite 
above " the things independent of the will." After a com- 
fortless and stormy voyage, on the fifth morning the sun 
shone, and through a mist the barren cliffs of Galicia, with 
breakers tumbling at their feet, rose in sight. Who has 
not experienced, when first he has touched a foreign soil, 
how nature purges the visual nerve with lucky euphrasy ? 
The shadowy streets, the latticed houses, the fountains, the 
fragments of Moorish architecture, the Jewish faces of the 
men, the lustrous eyes of girls, the children gaily bediz- 
ened, the old witch -like women with brown shrivelled 
parchment for skin, told Southey that he was far from 
home. Nor at night was he permitted to forget his 
whereabouts; out of doors cats were uttering soft things 
in most vile Spanish ; beneath his blanket, familiars, blood- 
thirsty as those of the Inquisition, made him their own. 
He was not sorry when the crazy coach, drawn by six 
mules, received him and his uncle, and the journey east- 



chap, m.] WANDERINGS, 1795— 1803. 45 

ward began to the shout of the muleteers and the clink of 
a hundred bells. 

Some eighteen days were spent upon the road to Ma- 
drid. Had Southey not left half his life behind him in 
Bristol, those December days would have been almost 
wholly pleasurable. As it was, they yielded a large posses- 
sion for the inner eye, and gave his heart a hold upon this 
new land which, in a certain sense, became for ever after 
the land of his adoption. It was pleasant when, having 
gone forward on foot, he reached the crest of some moun- 
tain road, to look down on broken waters in the glen, and 
across to the little white-walled convent amid its chestnuts, 
and back to the dim ocean ; there, on the summit, to rest 
with the odour of furze blossoms and the tinkle of goats 
in the air, and, while the mules wound up the long ascent, 
to turn all this into hasty rhymes, ending with the thought 
of peace, and love, and Edith. Then the bells audibly ap- 
proaching, and the loud-voiced muleteer consigning his 
struggling team to Saint Michael and three hundred dev- 
ils ; and then on to remoter hills, or moor and swamp, or 
the bridge flung across a ravine, or the path above a preci- 
pice, with mist and moonlight below. And next day some 
walled city, with its decaying towers and dim piazza ; some 
church, with its balcony of ghastly skulls ; some abandon- 
ed castle, or jasper- pillared Moorish gateway and gallery. 
Nor were the little inns and baiting-houses without com- 
pensations for their manifold discomforts. The Spanish 
country-folk were dirty and ignorant, but they had a cour- 
tesy unknown to English peasants ; Southey would join 
the group around the kitchen fire, and be, as far as his im- 
perfect speech allowed, one with the rustics, the carriers, 
the hostess, the children, the village barber, the familiar 
priest, and the familiar pigs. When chambermaid Jo- 



46 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

sepha took hold of his hair and gravely advised him never 
to tie it or to wear powder, she meant simple friendliness, 
no more. In his recoil from the dream of human perfec- 
tibility, Southey allowed himself at times to square ac- 
counts with common-sense by a cynical outbreak ; but, in 
truth, he was a warm-hearted lover of his kind. Even feu- 
dalism and Catholicism had not utterly degraded the Span- 
iard. Southey thanks God that the pride of chivalry is 
extinguished ; his Protestant zeal becomes deep - dyed in 
presence of our Lady of Seven Sorrows and the Holy 
Napkin. " Here, in the words of Mary Wollstonecraft," 
he writes, "'the serious folly of Superstition stares every 
man of sense in the face.' " Yet Spain has inherited ten- 
der and glorious memories; by the river Ezla he recalls 
Montemayor's wooing of his Diana ; at Tordesillas he 
muses on the spot where Queen Joanna watched by her 
husband's corpse, and where Padilla, Martyr of Freedom, 
triumphed and endured. At length the travellers, accom- 
panied by Manuel, the most vivacious and accomplished of 
barbers, drew near Madrid, passed the miles of kneeling 
washerwomen and outspread clothes on the river banks, 
entered the city, put up at the Cruz de Malta, and were 
not ill-content to procure once more a well-cooked supper 
and a clean bed. 

Southey pursued with ardour his study of the Spanish 
language, and could soon talk learnedly of its great writers. 
The national theatres, and the sorry spectacle of bullock- 
teasing, made a slighter impression upon him than did the 
cloisters of the new Franciscan Convent. He had been 
meditating his design of a series of poems to illustrate the 
mythologies of the world ; here the whole portentous his- 
tory of St. Francis was displayed upon the walls. "Do 
they believe all this, sir ?" he asked Mr. Hill. " Yes, and 



in.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 47 

a great deal more of the same kind," was the reply. " My 
first thought was . . . here is a mythology not less wild 
and fanciful than any of those upon which my imagina- 
tion was employed, and one which ought to be included 
in my ambitious design." Thus Southey's attention was 
drawn for the first time to the legendary and monastic 
history of the Church. 

His Majesty of Spain, with his courtesans and his cour- 
tiers, possibly also with the Queen and her gallants, had 
gone westward to meet the Portuguese court upon the 
borders. As a matter of course, therefore, no traveller 
could hope to leave Madrid, every carriage, cart, horse, mule, 
and ass being embargoed for the royal service. The fol- 
lowers of the father of his people numbered seven thou- 
sand, and they advanced, devouring all before them, neither 
paying nor promising to pay, leaving a broad track behind 
as bare as that stripped by an army of locusts, with here 
a weeping cottager, and there a smoking cork-tree, for a 
memorial of their march. Ten days after the king's de- 
parture, Mr. Hill and his nephew succeeded in finding a 
buggy with two mules, and made their escape, taking with 
them their own larder. Their destination was Lisbon, and 
as they drew towards the royal party, the risk of embargo 
added a zest to travel hardly less piquant than that impart- 
ed by the neighbourhood of bandits. It was mid-January ; 
the mountains shone with snow ; but olive-gathering had 
begun in the plains ; violets were in blossom, and in the 
air was a genial warmth. As they drove south and west, 
the younger traveller noted for his diary the first appear- 
ance of orange - trees, the first myrtle, the first fence of 
aloes. A pressure was on their spirits till Lisbon should 
be reached ; they would not linger to watch the sad pro- 
cession attending a body uncovered upon its bier; they 



48 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

left behind the pilgrims to our Lady's Shrine, pious bac- 
chanals half naked and half drunk, advancing to the tune 
of bagpipe and drum ; then the gleam of waters before 
them, a rough two hours' passage, and the weary heads 
were on their pillows, to be roused before morning by an 
earthquake, with its sudden trembling and cracking. 

Life at Lisbon was not altogether after Southey's heart. 
His uncle's books and manuscripts were indeed a treasure 
to explore, but Mr. Hill lived in society as well as in his 
study, and thought it right to give his nephew the advan- 
tage of new acquaintances. What had the author of Joan 
of Arc, the husband of Edith Southey, the disciple of 
Rousseau, of Godwin, the Stoic, the tall, dark-eyed young 
man with a certain wildness of expression in his face, 
standing alone or discoursing earnestly on Industrial Com- 
munities of Women — what had he to do with the inania 
regna of the drawing-room? He cared not for cards nor 
for dancing ; he possessed no gift for turning the leaves 
on the harpsichord, and saying the happy word at the 
right moment. Southey, indeed, knew as little as possible 
of music ; and all through his life acted on the principle 
that the worthiest use of sound without sense had been 
long ago discovered by schoolboys let loose from their 
tasks ; he loved to create a chaos of sheer noise after those 
hours during which silence had been interrupted only by 
the scraping of his pen. For the rest, the sallies of glee 
from a mountain brook, the piping of a thrush from the 
orchard-bough, would have delighted him more than all 
the trills of Sontag or the finest rapture of Malibran. It 
was with some of the superiority and seriousness of a 
philosopher just out of his teens that he unbent to the 
frivolities of the Lisbon drawing-rooms. 

But if Lisbon had its vexations, the country, the climate, 



in.] WANDERINGS, 1795— 1803. 49 

the mountains with their streams and coolness, the odorous 
gardens, Tagns flashing in the sunlight, the rough bar glit- 
tering with white breakers, and the Atlantic, made amends. 
When April came, Mr. Hill moved to his house at Cintra, 
and the memories and sensations "felt in the blood and 
felt along the heart," which Southey brought with him 
to England, were especially associated with this delightful 
retreat. "Never was a house more completely secluded 
than my uncle's : it is so surrounded with lemon-trees and 
laurels as nowhere to be visible at the distance of ten 
yards. ... A little stream of water runs down the hill 
before the door, another door opens into a lemon-garden, 
and from the sitting-room we have just such a prospect 
over lemon -trees and laurels to an opposite hill as, by 
promising a better, invites us to walk ... On one of the 
mountain eminences stands the Penha Convent, visible 
from the hills near Lisbon. On another are the ruins of 
a Moorish castle, and a cistern, within its boundaries, kept 
always full by a spring of purest water that rises in it. 
From this elevation the eye stretches over a bare and mel- 
ancholy country to Lisbon on the one side, and on the 
other to the distant Convent of Mafra, the Atlantic bound- 
ing the greater part of the prospect. I never beheld a 
view that so effectually checked the wish of wandering." 

" Lisbon, from which God grant me a speedy deliver- 
ance," is the heading of one of Southey's letters; but 
when the day came to look on Lisbon perhaps for the last 
time, his heart grew heavy with happy recollection. It 
was with no regretful feeling, however, that he leaped 
ashore, glad, after all, to exchange the sparkling Tagus and 
the lemon groves of Portugal for the mud-encumbered 
tide of Avon and a glimpse of British smoke. " I intend 
to write a hymn," he says, " to the Dii Penates." His joy 
3* 



50 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

in reunion with his wife was made more rare and tender 
by finding her in sorrow ; the grief was also peculiarly his 
own — Lovell was dead. He had been taken ill at Salis- 
bury, and by his haste to reach his fireside had heightened 
the fever which hung upon him. Coleridge, writing to 
his friend Poole at this time, expresses himself with amia- 
ble but inactive piety : " The widow is calm, and amused 
with her beautiful infant. We are all become more relig- 
ious than we were. God be ever praised for all things." 
Southey also writes characteristically : " Poor Lovell ! I 
am in hopes of raising something for his widow by pub- 
lishing his best pieces, if only enough to buy her a harp- 
sichord. . . . Will you procure me some subscribers?" 
No idle conceit of serving her ; for Mrs. Lovell with her 
child, as well as Mrs. Coleridge with her children, at a 
later time became members of the Southey household. 
Already — though Coleridge might resent it — Southey was 
willing to part with some vague enthusiasms which wan- 
dered in the inane of a young man's fancy, for the sake 
of simple loyalties and manly tendernesses. No one was 
more boyish-hearted than Southey at fifty ; but even at 
twenty-two it would not have been surprising to find grey 
hairs sprinkling the dark. " How does time mellow down 
our opinions ! Little of that ardent enthusiasm which so 
lately fevered my whole character remains. I have con- 
tracted my sphere of action within the little circle of my 
own friends, and even my wishes seldom stray beyond 
it. . . . I want a little room to arrange my books in, and 
some Lares of my own." This domestic feeling was not 
a besotted contentment in narrow interests ; no man was 
more deeply moved by the political changes in his own 
country, by the national uprising in the Spanish peninsula, 
than Southey. While seated at his desk, his intellect ranged 



vi.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 61 

through dim centuries of the past. But his heart needed 
an abiding-place, and he yielded to the bonds — strict and 
dear — of duty and of love which bound his own life to 
the lives of others. 

The ambitious quarto on which Cottle prided himself 
not a little was now published (1796). To assign its true 
place to Joan of Arc, we must remember that narrative 
poetry in the eighteenth century was of the slenderest 
dimensions and the most modest temper. Poems of 
description and sentiment seemed to leave no place for 
poems of action and passion. Delicately finished cabinet 
pictures, like Shenstone's Schoolmistress and Goldsmith's 
Deserted Village, had superseded fresco. The only great 
English epic of that century is the prose Odyssey of which 
Mr. Tom Jones is the hero. That estimable London mer- 
chant, Glover, had indeed written an heroic poem contain- 
ing the correct number of Books ; its subject was a lofty 
one ; the sentiments were generous, the language digni- 
fied ; and inasmuch as Leonidas was a patriot and a Whig, 
true Whigs and patriots bought and praised the poem. 
But Glover's poetry lacks the informing breath of life. 
His second poem, The Athenaid, appeared after his death, 
and its thirty books fell plumb into the water of oblivion. 
It looked as if the narrative poem a longue haleine was 
dead in English literature. Cowper had given breadth, 
with a mingled gaiety and gravity, to the poetry of de- 
scription and sentiment ; Burns had made the air tremu- 
lous with snatches of pure and thrilling song ; the Lyrical 
Ballads were not yet. At this moment, from a provin- 
cial press, Joan of Arc was issued. As a piece of roman- 
tic narrative it belongs to the new age of poetry ; in senti- 
ment it is revolutionary and republican; its garment of 
style is of the eighteenth century. Nowhere, except it be 



52 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

in the verses which hail " Inoculation, lovely Maid !" does 
the personified abstraction, galvanized into life by print- 
er's type and poet's epithet, stalk more at large than 
in the unfortunate ninth book, the Vision of the Maid, 
which William Taylor, of Norwich, pronounced worthy of 
Dante. The critical reviews of the time were liberal in 
politics, and the poem was praised and bought. " Brissot 
murdered " was good, and " the blameless wife of Roland " 
atoned for some offences against taste ; there was also that 
notable reference to the "Almighty people" who "from 
their tyrant's hand dashed down the iron rod." The del- 
egated maid is a creature overflowing with Rousseauish 
sensibility ; virtue, innocence, the peaceful cot, stand over 
against the wars and tyranny of kings, and the supersti- 
tion and cruelty of prelates. Southey himself soon dis- 
relished the youthful heats and violences of the poem ; he 
valued it as the work which first lifted him into public 
view ; and, partly out of a kind of gratitude, he rehandled 
the Joan again and again. It would furnish an instruc- 
tive lesson to a young writer to note how its asperities 
were softened, its spasm subdued, its swelling words abated. 
Yet its chief interest will be perceived only by readers of 
the earlier text. To the second book Coleridge contrib- 
uted some four hundred lines, where Platonic philosophy 
and protests against the Newtonian hypothesis of aether 
are not very appropriately brought into connexion with 
the shepherd - girl of Domremi. These lines disappeared 
from all editions after the first. 1 

1 I find in a Catalogue of English Poetry, 1862, the following 
passage from an autograph letter of S. T. Coleridge, dated Bristol, 
July 16, 1814, then in Mr. Pickering's possession: "I looked over 
the first five books of the first (quarto) edition of Joan of Arc yes- 
terday, at Hood's request, in order to mark the lines written by me. 



in.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 53 

The neighbourhood of Bristol was for the present 
Southey's home. The quickening of his blood by the 
beauty, the air and sun, of Southern Europe, the sense 
of power imparted by his achievement in poetry, the joy 
of reunion with his young wife, the joy, also, of solitude 
among rocks and woods, combined to throw him into a 
vivid and creative mood. His head was full of designs 
for tragedies, epics, novels, romances, tales — among the 
rest, " My Oriental poem of The Destruction of the Dom 
Daniel." He has a " Helicon kind of dropsy " upon him ; 
he had rather leave off eating than poetizing. He was 
also engaged in making the promised book of travel for 
Cottle ; in what leisure time remained after these employ- 
ments he scribbled for The Monthly Magazine, and to 
good purpose, for in eight months he had earned no less 
than " seven pounds and two pair of breeches," which, as 
he observes to his brother Tom, " is not amiss." He was 
resolved to be happy, and he was happy. Now, too, the 
foolish estrangement on Coleridge's part was brought to 
an end. Southey had been making some acquaintance 
with German literature at second hand. He had read 
Taylor's rendering of Burger's Lenore, and wondered who 
this William Taylor was ; he had read Schiller's Cabal and 
Love in a wretched translation, finding the fifth act dread- 
fully affecting; he had also read Schiller's Fiesco. Cole- 
ridge was just back after a visit to Birmingham, but still 

I was really astonished — 1, at the schoolboy, wretched allegoric ma- 
chinery ; 2, at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a 
modern Novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason, a Tom Paine 
in petticoats, but so lovely ! and in love more dear ! ' On her rvhied 
cheek hung pity's crystal gem ;' 3, at the utter want of all rhythm in 
the verse, the monotony and the dead plumb down of the pauses, and 
of the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines." 



64 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

held off from his brother-in-law and former friend. A 
sentence from Schiller, copied on a slip of paper by South- 
ey, with a word or two of conciliation, was sent to the 
offended Abdiel of Pantisocracy : " Fiesco ! Fiesco ! thou 
leavest a void in my bosom, which the human race, thrice 
told, will never fill up." It did not take much to melt the 
faint resentment of Coleridge, and to open his liberal heart. 
An interview followed, and in an hour's time, as the story 
is told by Coleridge's nephew, " these two extraordinary 
youths were arm in arm again." 

Seven pounds and two pair of breeches are not amiss, 
but pounds take to themselves wings, and fly away: a 
poet's wealth is commonly in the paulo-post-futurum 
tense; it therefore behoved Southey to proceed with his 
intended study of the law. By Christmas he would re- 
ceive the first instalment of an annual allowance of 160£. 
promised by his generous friend Wynn upon coming of 
age ; but Southey, who had just written his Hymn to the 
Penates — a poem of grave tenderness and sober beauty — 
knew that those deities are exact in their demand for the 
dues of fire and salt, for the firstlings of fruits, and for of- 
ferings of fine flour. A hundred and sixty pounds would 
not appease them. To London, therefore, he must go, and 
Blackstone must become his counsellor. But never did 
Sindbad suffer from the tyrannous old man between his 
shoulders as Robert Southey suffered from Blackstone. 
London in itself meant deprivation of all that he most 
cared for; he loved to shape his life in large and simple 
lines, and London seemed to scribble over his conscious- 
ness with distractions and intricacies. " My spirits always 
sink when I approach it. Green fields are my delight. 
I am not only better in health, but even in heart, in the 
country." Some of his father's love of rural sights and 



in.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 55 

sounds was in him, though hare-hunting was not an amuse- 
ment of Southey the younger ; he was as little of a sports- 
man as his friend Sir Thomas More : the only murderous 
sport, indeed, which Southey ever engaged in was that of 
pistol-shooting, with sand for ammunition, at the wasps in 
Bedford's garden, when he needed a diversion from the wars 
of Talbot and the "missioned Maid." Two pleasures of 
a rare kind London offered — the presence of old friends, 
and the pursuit of old books upon the stalls. But not 
even for these best lures proposed by the Demon of the 
place would Southey renounce 

" The genial influences 
And thoughts and feelings to be found where'er 
We breathe beneath the open sky, and see 
Earth's liberal bosom." 

To London, however, he would go, and would read nine 
hours a day at law. Although he pleaded at times against 
his intended profession, Southey really made a strenuous 
effort to overcome his repugnance to legal studies, and for 
a while Blackstone and Madoc seemed to advance side by 
side. But the bent of his nature was strong. " I com- 
mit wilful murder on my own intellect," he writes, two 
years later, " by drudging at law." And the worst or the 
best of it was that all his drudgery was useless. Southey's 
memory was of that serviceable, sieve-like kind which re- 
tains everything needful to its possessor, and drops every- 
thing which is mere incumbrance. Every circumstance in 
the remotest degree connected with the seminary of ma- 
gicians in the Dom Daniel under the roots of the sea ad- 
hered to his memory, but how to proceed in the Court of 
Common Pleas was always just forgotten since yesterday. 
" I am not indolent ; I loathe indolence ; but, indeed, read- 



56 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

ing law is laborious indolence — it is thrashing straw. . . . 
I have given all possible attention, and attempted to com- 
mand volition ; . . . close the book and all was gone." In 
1801 there was a chance of Southey's visiting Sicily as 
secretary to some Italian Legation. " It is unfortunate," 
he writes to Bedford, " that you cannot come to the sac- 
rifice of one law-book — my whole proper stock — whom I 
design to take up to the top of Mount Etna, for the ex- 
press purpose of throwing him straight to the devil. Huz- 
za, Grosvenor ! I was once afraid that I should have a dead- 
ly deal of law to forget whenever I had done with it ; but 
my brains, God bless them, never received any, and I am as 
ignorant as heart could wish. The tares would not grow." 
As spring advanced, impatience quickened within him ; 
the craving for a lonely place in sight of something green 
became too strong. Why might not law be read in Hamp- 
shire under blue skies, and also poetry be written ? South- 
ey longed to fill his eyesight with the sea, and with sun- 
sets over the sea ; he longed to renew that delicious shock 
of plunging in salt waves which he had last enjoyed in the 
Atlantic at the foot of the glorious Arrabida mountain. 
Lodgings were found at Burton, near Christ Church (1797) ; 
and here took place a little Southey family-gathering, for 
his mother joined them, and his brother Tom, the mid- 
shipman, just released from a French prison. Here, too, 
came Cottle, and there were talks about the new volume 
of shorter poems. Here came Lloyd, the friend of Cole- 
ridge, himself a writer of verse ; and with Lloyd came 
Lamb, the play of whose letters show that he found in 
Southey not only a fellow-lover of quaint books, but also 
a ready smiler at quips and cranks and twinklings of sly 
absurdity. And here he found John Rickman, " the stur- 
diest of jovial companions," whose clear head and stout 



in.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 67 

heart were at Southey's service whenever they were need- 
ed through all the future years. 

When the holiday at Burton was at an end Southey 
had for a time no fixed abode. He is now to be seen 
roaming over the cliffs by the Avon, and now casting a 
glance across some book-stall near Gray's Inn. In these 
and subsequent visits to London he was wistful for home, 
and eager to hasten back. "At last, my dear Edith, I sit 
down to write to you in quiet and something like com- 
fort. . . . My morning has been spent pleasantly, for it has 
been spent alone in the library; the hours so employed 
pass rapidly enough, but I grow more and more home- 
sick, like a spoilt child. On the 29th you may expect me. 
Term opens on the 26th. After eating my third dinner, I 
can drive to the mail, and thirteen shillings will be well 
bestowed in bringing me home four-and-twenty hours ear- 
lier : it is not above sixpence an hour, Edith, and I would 
gladly purchase an hour at home now at a much higher 
price." 

A visit to Norwich (1798) was pleasant and useful, as 
widening the circle of his literary friends. Here Southey 
obtained an introduction to William Taylor, whose trans- 
lations from the German had previously attracted his no- 
tice. Norwich, at the end of the last century and the be- 
ginning of the present, was a little Academe among pro- 
vincial oities, where the belles - lettres and mutual admira- 
tion were assiduously cultivated. Southey saw Norwich 
at its best. Among its "superior people" were several 
who really deserved something better than that vague dis- 
tinction. Chief among them was Dr. Sayers, whom the 
German critics compared to Gray, who had handled the 
Norse mythology in poetry, who created the English mon- 
odrame, and introduced the rhymeless measures followed 



58 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

by Southey. He rested too soon upon his well-earned 
reputation, contented himself with touching and retouch- 
ing his verses ; and possessing singularly pleasing manners, 
abounding information and genial wit, embellished and 
enjoyed society. 1 William Taylor, the biographer of Sav- 
ers, was a few years his junior. He was versed in Goethe, 
in Schiller, in the great Kotzebue — Shakspeare's immediate 
successor, in Klopstock, in the fantastic ballad, in the new 
criticism, and all this at a time when German characters 
were as undecipherable to most Englishmen as Assyrian 
arrow-heads. The whirligig of time brought an odd re- 
venge when Carlyle, thirty years later, hailed in Taylor the 
first example of " the natural-born English Philistine." In 
Norwich he was known as a model of filial virtue, a rising 
light of that illuminated city, a man whose extraordinary 
range pointed him out as the fit and proper person to be 
interrogated by any blue-stocking lady upon topics as re- 
mote as the domestic arrangements of the Chinese Emper- 
or, Chim-Cham-Chow. William Taylor had a command 
of new and mysterious words : he shone in paradox, and 
would make ladies aghast by " defences of suicide, avowals 
that snuff alone had rescued him from it ; information, given 
as certain, that ' God save the King ' was sung by Jeremiah 
in the Temple of Solomon ;" 3 with other blasphemies bor- 
rowed from the German, and too startling even for ration- 
alistic Norwich. Dr. Enfield, from whose Speaker our 
fathers learnt to recite "My name is Norval," was no 
longer living ; he had just departed in the odour of dilet- 
tantism. But solemn Dr. Alderson was here, and was now 
engaged in giving away his daughter Amelia to a divorced 

1 See Southey's article on "Dr. Sayers's Works," Quarterly Re- 
view, January, 1827. 
4 Harriet Martineau : Autobiography, i. p. 300. 



in.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 59 

bridegroom, the painter Opie. Just now Elizabeth Gurney 
was listening in the Friends' Meeting-House to that dis- 
course which transformed her from a gay haunter of coun- 
try ball-rooms to the sister and servant of Newgate pris- 
oners. The Martineaus also were of Norwich, and upon 
subsequent visits the author of Thalaba and Kehama was 
scrutinized by the keen eyes of a little girl — not born at 
the date of his first visit — who smiled somewhat too early 
and somewhat too maliciously at the airs and affectations 
of her native town, and whose pleasure in pricking a wind- 
bag, literary, political, or religious, was only over-exquisite. 
But Harriet Martineau, who honoured courage, purity, 
faithfulness, and strength wherever they were found, rev- 
erenced the Tory Churchman, Robert Southey. 1 

Soon after his return from Norwich, a small house was 
taken at Westbury (1797), a village two miles distant from 
Bristol. During twelve happy months this continued to 
be Southey's home. " I never before or since," he says in 
one of the prefaces to his collected poems, " produced so 
much poetry in the same space of time." William Taylor, 
by talks about Voss and the German idylls, had set South- 
ey thinking of a series of English Eclogues ; Taylor also 
expressed his wonder that some one of our poets had not 
undertaken what the French and Germans so long support- 
ed — an Almanack of the Muses, or Annual Anthology of 
minor poems by various writers. The suggestion was well 
received by Southey, who became editor of such annual 
volumes for the years 1799 and 1800. At this period 
were produced many of the ballads and short pieces which 
are perhaps more generally known than any other of 
Southey's writings. He had served his apprenticeship to 

1 See her " History of the Peace," B. vi. chap. xvi. 



60 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

the craft and mystery of such verse-making in the Morn- 
ing Post, earning thereby a guinea a week, but it was not 
until Bishop Bruno was written at Westbury that he had 
the luck to hit off the right tone, as he conceived it, of the 
modern ballad. The popularity of his Mary the Maid of 
the Inn, which unhappy children got by heart, and which 
some one even dramatized, was an affliction to its author, 
for he would rather have been remembered as a ballad 
writer in connexion with Rudiger and Lord William. 
What he has written in this kind certainly does not move 
the heart as with a trumpet ; it does not bring with it the 
dim burden of sorrow which is laid upon the spirit by 
songs like those of Yarrow crooning of " old, unhappy, far- 
off things." But to tell a tale of fantasy briefly, clearly, 
brightly, and at the same time with a certain heightening 
of imaginative touches, is no common achievement. The 
spectre of the murdered boy in Lord William shone upon 
by a sudden moonbeam, and surrounded by the welter of 
waves, is more than a picturesque apparition ; readers of 
goodwill may find him a very genuine little ghost, a stern 
and sad justicer. What has been named " the lyrical cry " 
is hard to find in any of Southey's shorter poems. In 
Roderick and elsewhere he takes delight in representing 
great moments of life when fates are decided; but such 
moments are usually represented as eminences on which 
will and passion wrestle in a mortal embrace, and if the 
cry of passion be heard, it is often a half-stifled death cry. 
The best of Southey's shorter poems, expressing personal 
feelings, are those which sum up the virtue spread over 
seasons of life and long habitual moods. Sometimes he is 
simply sportive, as a serious man released from thought and 
toil may be, and at such times the sportiveness, while gen- 
uine as a schoolboy's, is, like a schoolboy's, the reverse of 



m.] WANDERINGS, 1*795— 1803. > 61 

keen -edged; on other occasions he expresses simply a 
strong man's endurance of sorrow ; but more often an un- 
dertone of gravity appears through his glee, and in his sor- 
row there is something of solemn joy. 

All this year (1799) Madoc was steadily advancing, and 
The Destruction of the Bom Daniel had been already 
sketched in outline. Southey was fortunate in finding an 
admirable listener. The Pneumatic Institution, established 
in Bristol by Dr. Beddoes, was now under the care of a 
youth lately an apothecary's apprentice at Penzance, a 
poet, but still more a philosopher, " a miraculous young 
man." " He is not yet twenty-one, nor has he applied to 
chemistry more than eighteen months, but he has advanced 
with such seven-leagued strides as to overtake everybody. 
His name is Davy " — Humphry Davy — " the young chem- 
ist, the young everything, the man least ostentatious, of 
first talent that I have ever known." Southey would walk 
across from Westbury, an easy walk over beautiful ground, 
to breathe Davy's wonder-working gas, " which excites all 
possible mental and muscular energy, and induces almost a 
delirium of pleasurable sensations without any subsequent 
dejection." Pleased to find scientific proof that he pos- 
sessed a poet's fine susceptibility, he records that the ni- 
trous oxide wrought upon him more readily than upon any 
other of its votaries. " Oh, Tom !" he exclaims, gasping 
and ebullient — " oh, Tom ! such a gas has Davy discovered, 
the gaseous oxyde ! . . . Davy has actually invented a new 
pleasure for which language has no name. I am going for 
more this evening ; it makes one strong, and so happy ! so 
gloriously happy ! . . . Oh, excellent air-bag !" If Southey 
drew inspiration from Davy's air-bag, could Davy do less 
than lend his ear to Southey's epic? They would stroll 
back to Martin Hall — so christened because the birds who 



62 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

love delicate air built under its eaves their "pendant beds" 
— and in the large sitting-room, its recesses stored with 
books, or seated near the currant-bushes in the garden, 
the tenant of Martin Hall would read aloud of Urien and 
Madoc and Cadwallon. When Davy had said good-bye, 
Southey would sit long in the window open to the west, 
poring on the fading glories of sunset, while about him 
the dew was cool, and the swallows' tiny shrieks of glee 
grew less frequent, until all was hushed and another day 
was done. And sometimes he would muse how all things 
that he needed for utter happiness were here — all things 
— and then would rise an ardent desire — except a child. 

Martin Hall was unhappily held on no long lease ; its 
owner now required possession, and the Southeys, with 
their household gods, had reluctantly to bid it farewell. 
Another trouble, and a more formidable one, at the same 
time threatened. What with Annual Anthologies, Madoc 
in Wales, Madoc in Aztlan, the design for a great poem 
on the Deluge, for a Greek drama, for a Portuguese trag- 
edy, for a martyrdom play of the reign of Queen Mary — 
what with reading Spanish, learning Dutch, translating and 
reviewing for the booksellers — Southey had been too close- 
ly at work. His heart began to take fits of sudden and 
violent pulsation ; his sleep, ordinarily as sound as a child's, 
became broken and unrefreshing. Unless the disease were 
thrown off by regular exercise, Beddoes assured him, it 
would fasten upon him, and could not be overcome. Two 
years previously they had spent a summer at Burton, in 
Hampshire; why should they not go there again? In 
June, 1799, unaccompanied by his wife, whose health seem- 
ed also to be impaired, Southey went to seek a house. 
Two cottages, convertible into one, with a garden, a fish- 
pond, and a pigeon-house, promised a term of quiet and 



ra.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 63 

comfort in " Southey Palace that is to be." Possession 
was not to be bad until Michaelmas, and part of tbe in- 
tervening time was very enjoyably spent in roaming among 
tbe vales and woods, tbe coombes and cliffs of Devon. It 
was in some measure a renewal of tbe open-air deligbt 
wbicb bad been bis at tbe Arrabida and Cintra. " I bave 
seen tbe Valley of Stones," be writes : " Imagine a narrow 
vale between two ridges of bills somewhat steep ; the 
southern bill turfed; the vale which runs from east to 
west covered with huge stones and fragments of stones 
among the fern that fills it ; the northern ridge completely 
bare, excoriated of all turf and all soil, the very bones and 
skeleton of the earth; rock reclining upon rock, stone 
piled upon stone, a huge and terrific mass. A palace of 
the Preadamite kings, a city of the Anakim, must have 
appeared so shapeless and yet so like the ruins of what 
had been shaped, after the waters of tbe flood subsided. 
I ascended with some toil the highest point; two large 
stones inclining on each other formed a rude portal on the 
summit: here I sat down; a little level platform about 
two yards long lay before me, and then the eye fell im- 
mediately upon the sea, far, very far below. I never felt 
the sublimity of solitude before." 

But Soutbey could not rest. " I had rather leave off 
eating than poetizing," he had said ; and now the words 
seemed coming true, for he still poetized, and had almost 
ceased to eat. " Yesterday I finished Madoc, thank God ! 
and thoroughly to my own satisfaction ; but I have re- 
solved on one great, laborious, and radical alteration. It 
was my design to identify Madoc with Mango Capac, the 
legislator of Peru : in this I have totally failed ; therefore 
Mango Capac is to be the hero of another poem." There 
is something charming in the logic of Soutbey's " there- 



64 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

fore;" so excellent an epic hero must not go to waste; 
but when, on the following morning, he rose early, it was 
to put on paper the first hundred lines, not of Mango Ca- 
pac, but of the Dom Daniel poem which we know as Thala- 
ba. A Mohammed, to be written in hexameters, was also on 
the stocks ; and Coleridge had promised the half of this. 
Southey, who remembered a certain quarto volume on 
Pantisocracy and other great unwritten works, including 
the last — a Life of Lessing, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge — 
knew the worth of his cojlaborateur's promises. However, 
it matters little ; " the only inconvenience that his derelic- 
tion can occasion will be that I shall write the poem in 
fragments, and have to seam them together at last." " My 
Mohammed will be what I believe the Arabian was in the 
beginning of his career — sincere in enthusiasm; and it 
would puzzle a casuist to distinguish between the belief 
of inspiration and actual enthusiasm." A short fragment 
of the Mohammed was actually written by Coleridge, and 
a short fragment by Southey, which, dating from 1799, 
have an interest in connexion with the history of the Eng- 
lish hexameter. Last among these many projects, Southey 
has made up his mind to undertake one great historical 
work — the History of Portugal. This was no dream-proj- 
ect; Mango Capac never descended from his father the 
Sun to appear in Southey's poem; Mohammed never 
emerged from the cavern where the spider had spread his 
net ; but the work which was meant to rival Gibbon's great 
history was in part achieved. It is a fact more pathetic 
than many others which make appeal for tears, that this 
most ambitious and most cherished design of Southey's 
life, conceived at the age of twenty-six, and kept constant- 
ly in view through all his days of toil, was not yet half 
wrought out when, forty years later, the pen dropped 



in.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 65 

from his hand, and the worn-out brain could think no 
more. 

The deal shavings had hardly been cleared out of the 
twin cottages at Burton, when Southey was prostrated by 
a nervous fever ; on recovering, he moved to Bristol, still 
weak, with strange pains about the heart, and sudden 
seizures of the head. An entire change of scene was ob- 
viously desirable. The sound of the brook that ran beside 
his uncle's door at Cintra, the scent of the lemon-groves, 
the grandeur of the Arrabida, haunted his memory ; there 
were books and manuscripts to be found in Portugal which 
were essential in the preparation of his great history of 
that country. Mr. Hill invited him ; his good friend Elms- 
ley, an old schoolfellow, offered him a hundred pounds. 
From every point of view it seemed right and prudent to 
go. Ailing and unsettled as he was, he yet found strength 
and time to put his hand to a good work before leaving 
Bristol. Chatterton always interested Southey deeply; 
they had this much at least in common, that both had of- 
ten listened to the chimes of St. Mary Redcliffe, that both 
were lovers of antiquity, both were rich in store of verse, 
and lacked all other riches. Chatterton's sister, Mrs. New- 
ton, and her child were needy and neglected. It occurred 
to Southey and Cottle that an edition of her brother's 
poems might be published for her benefit. Subscribers 
came in slowly, and the plan underwent some alterations ; 
but in the end the charitable thought bore fruit, and the 
sister and niece of the great unhappy boy were lifted into 
security and comfort. To have done something to appease 
the moody and indignant spirit of a dead poet, was well ; 
to have rescued from want a poor woman and her daughter, 
was perhaps even better. 

Early in April, 1800, Southey was once more on his way 
4 



66 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

from Bristol, by Falmouth, to the Continent, accompanied 
by his wife, now about to be welcomed to Portugal by the 
fatherly uncle whose prudence she had once alarmed. The 
wind was adverse, and while the travellers were detained 
Southey strolled along the beach, caught soldier-crabs, and 
observed those sea-anemones which blossom anew in the 
verse of Thalaba. For reading on the voyage, he had 
brought Burns, Coleridge's poems, the Lyrical Ballads, and 
a poem, with " miraculous beauties," called Gebir, " written 
by God knows who." But when the ship lost sight of Eng- 
land, Southey, with swimming head, had little spirit left for 
wrestling with the intractable thews of Landor's early verse ; 
he could just grunt out some crooked pun or quaint phrase 
in answer to inquiries as to how he did. Suddenly, on 
the fourth morning, came the announcement that a French 
cutter was bearing down upon them. Southey leaped to 
his feet, hurriedly removed his wife to a place of safety, 
and, musket in hand, took his post upon the quarter-deck. 
The smoke from the enemy's matches could be seen. She 
was hailed, answered in broken English, and passed on. A 
moment more, and the suspense was over ; she was English, 
manned from Guernsey. " You will easily imagine," says 
Southey, " that my sensations at the ending of the business 
were very definable — one honest, simple joy that I was in 
a whole skin !" Two mornings more, and the sun rose be- 
hind the Berlings; the heights of Cintra became visible, 
and nearer, the silver dust of the breakers, with sea-gulls 
sporting over them ; a pilot's boat, with puffed and flap- 
ping sail, ran out ; they passed thankfully our Lady of the 
Guide, and soon dropped anchor in the Tagus. An ab- 
sence of four years had freshened every object to Southey's 
sense of seeing, and now he had the joy of viewing all fa- 
miliar things as strange through so dear a companion's eyes. 



in.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 67 

Mr. Hill was presently on board with kindly greeting ; 
he had hired a tiny house for them, perched well above the 
river, its little rooms cool with many doors and windows. 
Manuel the barber, brisk as Figaro, would be their factotum, 
and Mrs. Southey could also see a new maid — Maria Rosa. 
Maria by-and-by came to be looked at, in powder, straw- 
coloured gloves, fan, pink -ribands, muslin petticoat, green 
satin sleeves ; she was " not one of the folk who sleep on 
straw mattresses ;" withal she was young and clean. Mrs. 
Southey, who had liked little the prospect of being thrown 
abroad upon the world, was beginning to be reconciled to 
Portugal ; roses and oranges and green peas in early May 
were pleasant things. Then the streets were an unending 
spectacle ; now a negro going by with Christ in a glass 
case, to be kissed for a petty alms ; now some picturesque, 
venerable beggar; now the little Emperor of the Holy 
Ghost, strutting it from Easter till Whitsuntide, a six-year- 
old mannikin with silk stockings, buckles, cocked hat, and 
sword, his gentlemen ushers attending, and his servants re- 
ceiving donations on silver salvers. News of an assassina- 
tion, from time to time, did not much disturb the tranquil 
tenor of ordinary life. There were old gardens to loiter in 
along vine-trellised walks, or in sunshine where the grey 
lizards glanced and gleamed. And eastward from the city 
were lovely by-lanes amid blossoming olive-trees or mar- 
ket-gardens, veined by tiny aqueducts and musical with the 
creak of water-wheels, which told of cool refreshment. 
There was also the vast public aqueduct to visit; Edith 
Southey, holding her husband's hand, looked down, hardly 
discovering the diminished figures below of women wash- 
ing in the brook of Alcantara. If the sultry noon in Lis- 
bon was hard to endure, evening made amends; then 
strong sea-winds swept the narrowest alley, and rolled their 



68 SOUTHEY. [chap 

current down every avenue. And later, it was pure con- 
tent to look down upon the moonlighted river, with Al- 
mada stretching its black isthmus into the waters that 
shone like midnight snow. 

Before moving to Cintra, they wished to witness the 
procession of the Body of God — Southey likes the Eng- 
lish words as exposing " the naked nonsense of the blas- 
phemy " — those of St. Anthony, and the Heart of Jesus, 
and the first bull-fight. Everything had grown into one 
insufferable glare; the very dust was bleached; the light 
was like the quivering of a furnace fire. Every man and 
beast was asleep ; the stone-cutter slept with his head upon 
the stone ; the dog slept under the very cart-wheels ; the 
bells alone slept not, nor ceased from their importunate 
clamour. At length — it was near mid-June — a marvellous 
cleaning of streets took place, the houses were hung with 
crimson damask, soldiers came and lined the ways, win- 
dows and balconies filled with impatient watchers — not a 
jewel in Lisbon but was on show. With blare of music 
the procession began ; first, the banners of the city and 
its trades, the clumsy bearers crab-sidling along ; an armed 
champion carrying a flag ; wooden St. George held pain- 
fully on horseback ; led horses, their saddles covered with 
rich escutcheons ; all the brotherhoods, an immense train 
of men in red or grey cloaks; the knights of the orders 
superbly dressed ; the whole patriarchal church in glorious 
robes; and then, amid a shower of rose-leaves fluttering 
from the windows, the Pix, and after the Pix, the Prince. 
On a broiling Sunday, the amusement being cool and de- 
vout, was celebrated the bull-feast. The first wound sick- 
ened Edith ; Southey himself, not without an effort, looked 
on and saw " the death-sweat darkening the dun hide " — a 
circumstance borne in mind for his Thalaba. " I am not 



ra.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 69 

quite sure," he writes, " that my curiosity in once going 
was perfectly justifiable, but the pain inflicted by the sight 
was expiation enough." 

After this it was high time to take refuge from the sun 
among the lemon -groves at Cintra. Here, if ever in his 
life, Southey for a brief season believed that the grass- 
hopper is wiser than the ant ; a true Portuguese indolence 
overpowered him. " I have spent my mornings half naked 
in a wet room dozing upon the bed, my right hand not 
daring to touch my left." Such glorious indolence could 
only be a brief possession with Southey. More often he 
would wander by the streams to those spots where pur- 
ple crocuses carpeted the ground, and there rest and read. 
Sometimes seated sideways on one of the surefooted bur- 
ros, with a boy to beat and guide the brute, he would jog 
lazily on, while Edith, now skilled in " ass - womanship," 
would jog along on a brother donkey. Once and again a 
fog — not unwelcome — came rolling in from the ocean, one 
huge mass of mist, marching through the valley like a 
victorious army, approaching, blotting the brightness, but 
leaving all dank and fresh. And always the evenings were 
delightful, when fireflies sparkled under the trees, or in 
July and August, as their light went out, when the grillo 
began his song. "I eat oranges, figs, and delicious pears 
— drink Colares wine, a sort of half-way excellence between 
port and claret — read all I can lay my hands on — dream 
of poem after poem, and play after play — take a siesta of 
two hours, and am as happy as if life were but one ever- 
lasting to-day, and that to-morrow was not to be provided 
for." 

But Southey's second visit to Portugal was, on the 
whole, no season of repose. A week in the southern cli- 
mate seemed to have restored him to health, and he assail- 



70 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

ed folio after folio in his uncle's library, rising eacli morn- 
ing at five, " to lay in bricks for the great Pyramid of my 
history." The chronicles, the laws, the poetry of Portu- 
gal, were among these bricks. Nor did he slacken in his 
ardour as a writer of verse. Six books of Thalaba were in 
his trunk in manuscript when he sailed from Falmouth; 
the remaining six were of a southern birth. " I am busy," 
he says, " in correcting Thalaba for the press. ... It is a 
good job done, and so I have thought of another, and an- 
other, and another." As with Joan of Arc, so with this 
maturer poem the correction was a rehandling which dou- 
bled the writer's work. To draw the pen across six hun- 
dred lines did not cost him a pang. At length the manu- 
script was despatched to his friend Rickman, with instruc- 
tions to make as good a bargain as he could for the first 
thousand copies. By Joan and the miscellaneous Poems 
of 1797, Southey had gained not far from a hundred and 
fifty pounds; he might fairly expect a hundred guineas 
for Thalaba. It would buy the furniture of his long-ex- 
pected house. But he was concerned about the prospects 
of Harry, his younger brother; and now William Taylor 
wrote that some provincial surgeon of eminence would 
board and instruct the lad during four or five years 
for precisely a hundred guineas. "A hundred guineas !" 
Southey exclaims ; " well, but, thank God, there is Thalaba 
ready, for which I ask this sum." " Thalaba finished, all 
my poetry," he writes, " instead of being wasted in rivu- 
lets and ditches, shall flow into the great Madoc Mississip- 
pi river." One epic poem, however, he finds too little to 
content him ; already The Curse of Kehama is in his head, 
and another of the mythological series which never saw 
the light. " I have some distant view of manufacturing a 
Hindoo romance, wild as Thalaba; and a nearer one of a 



I 

in.] WANDEKINGS, 1795—1803. 11 

Persian story, of which I see the germ of vitality. I take 
the system of the Zendavesta for my mythology, and in- 
troduce the powers of darkness persecuting a Persian, one 
of the hundred and fifty sons of the great king ; an Athe- 
nian captive is a prominent character, and the whole war- 
fare of the evil power ends in exalting a Persian prince 
into a citizen of Athens." From which catastrophe we 
may infer that Southey had still something republican 
about his heart. 

Before quitting Portugal, the Southeys, with their friend 
Waterhouse and a party of ladies, travelled northwards, en- 
countering very gallantly the trials of the way ; Mafra, its 
convent and library, had been already visited by Southey. 
"Do you love reading?" asked the friar who accompanied 
them, overhearing some remark about the books. " Yes." 
"And I," said the honest Franciscan, "love eating and 
drinking." At Coimbra — that central point from which 
radiates the history and literature of Portugal — Southey 
would have agreed feelingly with the good brother of the 
Mafra convent ; he had looked forward to precious mo- 
ments of emotion in that venerable city ; but air and ex- 
ercise had given him a cruel appetite ; if truth must be 
told, the ducks of the monastic poultry -yard were more 
to him than the precious finger of St. Anthony. " I did 
long," he confesses, " to buy, beg, or steal a dinner." The 
dinner must somehow have been secured before he could 
approach in a worthy spirit that most affecting mon- 
ument at Coimbra — the Fountain of Tears. "It is the 
spot where Inez de Castro was accustomed to meet her 
husband Pedro, and weep for him in his absence. Cer- 
tainly her dwelling - house was in the adjoining garden ; 
and from there she was dragged, to be murdered at the 
feet of the king, her father-in-law. ... I, who have long 



12 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

planned a tragedy upon the subject, stood upon my own 
scene." While Southey and his companions gazed at 
the fountains and their shadowing cedar-trees, the gowns- 
men gathered round; the visitors were travel-stained and 
bronzed by the sun ; perhaps the witty youths cheered 
for the lady with the squaw tint ; whatever offence may 
have been given, the ladies' protectors found them " impu- 
dent blackguards," and with difficulty suppressed pugilistic? 
risings. 

After an excursion southwards to Algarve, Southey 
made ready for his return to England (1801). His wife 
desired it, and he had attained the main objects of his 
sojourn abroad. His health had never been more perfect ; 
he had read widely; he had gathered large material for 
his History; he knew where to put his hand on this or 
that which might prove needful, whenever he should re- 
turn to complete his work among the libraries of Portugal. 
On arriving at Bristol, a letter from Coleridge met him. 
It was dated from Greta Hall, Keswick ; and after remind- 
ing Southey that Bristol had recently lost the miraculous 
young man, Davy, and adding that he, Samuel Taylor Cole- 
ridge, had experiences, sufferings, hopes, projects to im- 
part, which would beguile much time, " were you on a 
desert island and I your Friday" it went on to present 
the attractions of Keswick, and in particular of Greta Hall, 
in a way which could not be resisted. Taking all in all — 
the beauty of the prospect, the roominess of the house, 
the lowness of the rent, the unparalleled merits of the 
landlord, the neighbourhood of noble libraries — it united 
advantages not to be found together elsewhere. "In 
short" — the appeal wound up — "for situation and con- 
venience — and when I mention the name of Words- 
worth, for society of men of intellect — I know no place 



in.] WANDERINGS, 179 5— 180& IS 

in which you and Edith would find yourselves so well 
suited." 

Meanwhile Drummond, an M.P. and a translator of Per- 
sius, who was going as ambassador, first to Palermo and 
then to Constantinople, was on the look-out for a secre- 
tary. The post would be obtained for Southey by his 
friend Wynn, if possible ; this might lead to a consulship ; 
why not to the consulship at Lisbon, with 1000/. a year? 
Such possibilities, however, could not prevent him from 
speedily visiting Coleridge and Keswick. " Time and ab- 
sence make strange work with our affections," so writes 
Southey ; " but mine are ever returning to rest upon you. 
I have other and dear friends, but none with whom the 
whole of my being is intimate. ... Oh ! I have yet such 
dreams. Is it quite clear that you and I were not meant 
for some better star, and dropped by mistake into this 
world of pounds, shillings, and pence?" So for the first 
time Southey set foot in Keswick, and looked upon the 
lake and the hills which were to become a portion of his 
being, and which have taken him so closely, so tenderly, to 
themselves. His first feeling was one not precisely of dis- 
appointment, but certainly of remoteness from this north- 
ern landscape; he had not yet come out from the glow 
and the noble abandon of the South. " These lakes," he 
says, " are like rivers ; but oh for the Mondego and the 
Tagus ! And these mountains, beautifully indeed are they 
shaped and grouped; but oh for the grand Monchique! 
and for Cintra, my paradise !" 

Time alone was needed to calm and temper his sense of 
seeing ; for when, leaving Mrs. Southey with her sister and 
Coleridge, he visited his friend Wynn at Llangedwin, and 
breathed the mountain air of his own Prince Madoc, all 
the loveliness of Welsh streams and rivers sank into his 
6 



W SOUTHEY. [chap. 

soul. "The Dee is broad and shallow, and its dark wa- 
ters shiver into white and silver and hues of amber brown. 
No mud upon the shore — no bushes — no marsh plants — 
anywhere a child might stand dry-footed and dip his hand 
into the water." And again a contrasted picture : " The 
mountain-side was stony, and a few trees grew among its 
stones ; the other side was more wooded, and had grass on 
the top, and a huge waterfall thundered into the bottom, 
and thundered down the bottom. When it had nearly 
passed these rocky straits, it met another stream. The 
width of water then became considerable, and twice it 
formed a large black pool, to the eye absolutely stagnant, 
the froth of the waters that entered there sleeping upon 
the surface ; it had the deadness of enchantment ; yet was 
not the pool wider than the river above it and below it, 
where it foamed over and fell." Such free delight as 
Southey had among the hills of Wales came quickly to an 
end. A letter was received offering him the position of 
private secretary to Mr. Corry, Chancellor of the Excheq- 
uer for Ireland, with a salary of four hundred pounds a 
year. Rickman was in Dublin, and this was Rickman's 
doing. Southey, as he was in prudence bound to do, ac- 
cepted the appointment, hastened back to Keswick, bade 
farewell for a little while to his wife, and started for Dub- 
lin in no cheerful frame of mind. 

At a later time, Southey possessed Irish friends whom 
he honoured and loved ; he has written wise and humane 
words about the Irish people. But all through his career 
Ireland was to Southey somewhat too much that ideal 
country — of late to be found only in the region of humor- 
ous-pathetic melodrama — in which the business of life is 
carried on mainly by the agency of bulls and blunder- 
busses ; and it required a distinct effort on his part to con* 



in.] WANDERINGS, 1 795— 1803. 15 

ceive the average Teague or Patrick otherwise than as a 
potato-devouring troglodyte, on occasions grotesquely ami- 
able, but more often with the rage of Popery working in 
his misproportioned features. Those hours during which 
Southey waited for the packet were among the heaviest 
of his existence. After weary tackings in a baffling wind, 
the ship was caught into a gale, and was whirled away, 
fifteen miles north of Dublin, to the fishing -town of 
Balbriggan. Then, a drive across desolate country, which 
would have depressed the spirits had it not been enlivened 
by the airs and humours of little Dr. Solomon, the unique, 
the omniscient, the garrulous, next after Bonaparte the 
most illustrious of mortals, inventor of the Cordial Balm 
of Gilead, and possessor of a hundred puncheons of rum. 
When the new private secretary arrived, the chancellor 
was absent ; the secretary, therefore, set to work on re- 
building a portion of his Madoc. Presently Mr. Corry 
appeared, and there was a bow and a shake of hands; 
then he hurried away to London, to be followed by 
Southey, who, going round by Keswick, was there joined 
by his wife. From London Southey writes to Rickman, 
" The chancellor and the scribe go on in the same way. 
The scribe hath made out a catalogue of all books pub- 
lished since the commencement of '97 upon finance and 
scarcity ; he hath also copied a paper written by J. R. 
[John Rickman] containing some Irish alderman's hints 
about oak-bark; and nothing more hath the scribe done 
in his vocation. Duly he calls at the chancellor's door; 
sometimes he is admitted to immediate audience ; some- 
times kicketh his heels in the antechamber; . . . some- 
times a gracious message emancipates him for the day. 
Secrecy hath been enjoined him as to these State proceed' 
ings. On three subjects he is directed to read and re- 



76 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

search — corn-laws, finance, tythes, according to their -writ 
ten order." The independent journals meanwhile had 
compared Corry and Southey, the two State conspirators, 
to Empson and Dudley ; and delicately expressed a hope 
that the poet would make no false numbers in his new work. 
Southey, who had already worn an ass's head in one of 
Gillray's caricatures, was not afflicted by the newspaper 
sarcasm; but the vacuity of such a life was intolerable; 
and when it was proposed that he should become tutor to 
Corry's son, he brought his mind finally to the point of 
resigning " a foolish oflSce and a good salary." His no- 
tions of competence were moderate ; the vagabondage be- 
tween the Irish and English headquarters entailed by his 
office was irksome. His books were accumulating, and 
there was ample work to be done among them if he had 
but a quiet library of his own. Then, too, there was anoth- 
er good reason for resigning. A new future was opening 
for Southey. Early in the year (1802) his mother died. 
She had come to London to be with her son; there she 
had been stricken with mortal illness ; true to her happy, 
self-forgetful instincts, she remained calm, uncomplaining, 
considerate for others. "Go down, my dear; I shall sleep 
presently," she had said, knowing that death was at hand. 
With his mother, the last friend of Southey's infancy and 
childhood was gone. "I calmed and curbed myself," he 
writes, " and forced myself to employment ; but at night 
there was no sound of feet in her bedroom, to which I 
had been used to listen, and in the morning it was not my 
first business to see her." The past was past indeed. But 
as the year opened, it brought a happy promise ; before 
summer would end, a child might be in his arms. Here 
were sufficient reasons for his resignation ; a library and a 
nursery ought, he says, to be stationary. 



in.] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 71 

To Bristol husband and wife came, and there found a 
small furnished house. After the roar of Fleet Street, 
and the gathering of distinguished men — Fuseli, Flaxman, 
Barry, Lamb, Campbell, Bowles — there was a strangeness 
in the great quiet of the place. But in that quiet Southey 
could observe each day the growth of the pile of manu- 
script containing his version of Amadis of Gaul, for which 
Longman and Rees promised him a munificent sixty pounds. 
He toiled at his History of Portugal, finding matter of 
special interest in that part which was concerned with the 
religious orders. He received from his Lisbon collection 
precious boxes folio - crammed. "My dear and noble 
books ! Such folios of saints ! dull books enough for my 
patience to diet upon, till all my flock be gathered togeth- 
er into one fold." Sixteen volumes of Spanish poetry are 
lying uncut in the next room ; a folio yet untasted jogs 
his elbow ; two of the best and rarest chronicles coyly in- 
vite him. He had books enough in England to employ 
three years of active industry. And underlying all thoughts 
of the great Constable Nuno Alvares Pereyra, of the King 
D. Joao I., and of the Cid, deeper than the sportsman 
pleasure of hunting from their lair strange facts about the 
orders Cistercian, Franciscan, Dominican, Jesuit, there was 
a thought of that new-comer whom, says Southey, "I al- 
ready feel disposed to call whelp and dog, and all those 
vocables of vituperation by which a man loves to call those 
he loves best." 

In September, 1802, was born Southey's first child, 
named Margaret Edith, after her mother and her dead 
grandmother; a flat -nosed, round -foreheaded, grey-eyed, 
good-humoured girl. " I call Margaret," he says, in a sober 
mood of fatherly happiness, "by way of avoiding all com- 
monplace phraseology of endearment, a worthy child and 



78 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

a most excellent character. She loves me better than any 
one except her mother; her eyes are as quick as thought; 
she is all life and spirit, and as happy as the day is long ; 
but that little brain of hers is never at rest, and it is pain- 
ful to see how dreams disturb her." For Margery and 
her mother and the folios a habitation must be found. 
Southey inclined now towards settling in the neighbour- 
hood of London — now towards Norwich, where Dr. Sayers 
and William Taylor would welcome him — now towards 
Keswick ; but its horrid latitude, its incessant rains ! On 
the whole, his heart turned most fondly to Wales; and 
there, in one of the loveliest spots of Great Britain, in the 
Vale of Xeath, was a house to let, by name Maes Gwyn. 
Southey gave his fancy the rein, and pictured himself 
" housed and homed " in Maes Gwyn, working steadily at 
the History of Portugal, and now and again glancing away 
from his work to have a look at Margery seated in her 
little great chair. But it was never to be; a difference 
with the landlord brought to an end his treaty for the 
house, and in August the child lay dying. It was bitter 
to part with what had been so long desired — during sev- 
en childless years — and what had grown so dear. But 
Southey's heart was strong ; he drew himself together, re- 
turned to his toil, now less joyous than before, and set 
himself to strengthen and console his wife. 

Bristol was henceforth a place of mournful memories. 
" Edith," writes Southey, " will be nowhere so well as 
with her sister Coleridge. She has a little girl some six 
months old, and I shall try and graft her into the wound 
while it is yet fresh." Thus Greta Hall received its guests 
(September, 1803). At first the sight of little Sara Cole- 
ridge and her baby cooings caused shootings of pain on 
which Southey had not counted. Was the experiment of 



iil] WANDERINGS, 1795—1803. 19 

this removal to prove a failure ? He still felt as if he were 
a feather driven by the wind. " I have no symptoms of 
root-striking here," he said. But he spoke, not knowing 
what was before him ; the years of wandering were indeed 
over ; here he had found his home. 



CHAPTER IV. 

WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803 — 1839. 

The best of life with Southey was yet to come ; but in 
what remains there are few outstanding events to chroni- 
cle ; there is nowhere any splendour of circumstance. Of 
some lives the virtue is distilled, as it were, into a few ex- 
quisite moments — moments of rapture, of vision, of sud- 
den and shining achievement ; all the days and years seem 
to exist only for the sake of such faultless moments, and 
it matters little whether such a life, of whose very essence 
it is to break the bounds of time and space, be long or 
short as measured by the falling of sandgrains or the 
creeping of a shadow. Southey's life was not one of 
these; its excellence was constant, uniform, perhaps some- 
what too evenly distributed. He wrought in his place day 
after day, season after season. He submitted to the good 
laws of use and wont. He grew stronger, calmer, more 
full-fraught with stores of knowledge, richer in treasure of 
the heart. Time laid its hand upon him gently and un- 
falteringly : the bounding step became less light and swift ; 
the ringing voice lapsed into sadder fits of silence ; the 
raven hair changed to a snowy white ; only still the inde- 
fatigable eye ran down the long folio columns, and the in~ 
defatigable hand still held the pen — until all true life had 
ceased. When it has been said that Southey was appoint- 



chap, it.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 81 

ed Pye's successor in the laureateship, that he received an 
honorary degree from his university, that now and again 
he visited the Continent, that children were born to him 
from among whom death made choice of the dearest ; and 
when we add that he wrote and published books, the lead- 
ing facts of Southey's life have been told. Had he been 
a worse or a weaker man, we might look to find mysteries, 
picturesque vices, or engaging follies ; as it is, everything 
is plain, straightforward, substantial. What makes the life 
of Southey eminent and singular is its unity of purpose, 
its persistent devotion to a chosen object, its simplicity, 
purity, loyalty, fortitude, kindliness, truth. 

The river Greta, before passing under the bridge at the 
end of Main Street, Keswick, winds about the little hill on 
which stands Greta Hall ; its murmur may be heard when 
all is still beyond the garden and orchard ; to the west it 
catches the evening light. "In front," Coleridge wrote 
when first inviting his friend to settle with him, " we have 
a giants' camp — an encamped army of tent-like mountains, 
which by an inverted arch gives a view of another vale. 
On our right the lovely vale and the wedge-shaped lake 
of Bassenthwaite ; and on our left Derwentwater and Lo- 
dore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrow- 
dale. Behind us the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, 
with two chasms and a tent -like ridge in the larger." 
Southey's house belongs in a peculiar degree to his life : 
in it were stored the treasures upon which his intellect 
drew for sustenance ; in it his affections found their earth- 
ly abiding -place; all the most mirthful, all the most 
mournful, recollections of Southey hang about it ; to it in 
every little wandering his heart reverted like an exile's; 
it was at once his workshop and his playground ; and for 
a time, while he endured a living death, it became his ante- 



82 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

chamber to the tomb. The rambling tenement consisted 
of two houses under one roof, the larger part being occu- 
pied by the Coleridges and Southeys, the smaller for a 
time by Mr. Jackson, their landlord. On the ground-floor 
was the parlour which served as dining-room and general 
sitting-room, a pleasant chamber looking upon the green 
in front; here also were Aunt Lovell's sitting-room, and 
the mangling -room, in which stood ranged in a row the 
long array of clogs, from the greatest even unto the least, 
figuring in a symbol the various stages of human life. 
The stairs to the right of the kitchen led to a landing- 
place filled with bookcases ; a few steps more led to the 
little bedroom occupied by Mrs. Coleridge and her daugh- 
ter. " A few steps farther," writes Sara Coleridge, whose 
description is here given in abridgment, " was a little wing 
bedroom — then the study, where my uncle sat all day oc- 
cupied with literary labours and researches, but which was 
used as a drawing-room for company. Here all the tea- 
visiting guests were received. The room had three win- 
dows, a large one looking down upon the green with the 
wide flower-border, and over to Keswick Lake and moun- 
tains beyond. There were two smaller windows looking 
towards the lower part of the town seen beyond the nurs- 
ery-garden. The room was lined with books in fine bind- 
ings ; there were books also in brackets, elegantly lettered 
vellum - covered volumes lying on their sides in a heap. 
The walls were hung with pictures, mostly portraits. ... At 
the back of the room was a comfortable sofa, and there 
were sundry tables, beside my uncle's library table, his 
screen, desk, etc. Altogether, with its internal fittings up, 
its noble outlook, and something pleasing in its propor- 
tions, this was a charming room." Hard by the study 
was Southey's bedroom. We need not ramble farther 



it.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 83 

through passages lined with books, and up and down 
flights of stairs to Mr. Jackson's organ -room, and Mrs. 
Lovell's room, and Hartley's parlour, and the nurseries, and 
the dark apple-room supposed to be the abode of a bogle. 
Without, greensward, flowers, shrubs, strawberry -beds, 
fruit-trees, encircled the house ; to the back, beyond the 
orchard, a little wood stretched down to the river-side. A 
rough path ran along the bottom of the wood ; here, on a 
covered seat, Southey often read or planned future work, 
and here his little niece loved to play in sight of the dim- 
pling water. " Dear Greta Hall !" she exclaims ; " and oh, 
that rough path beside the Greta! How much of my 
childhood, of my girlhood, of my youth, were spent there !" 
Southey's attachment to his mountain town and its lakes 
was of no sudden growth. He came to them as one not 
born under their influence ; that power of hills to which 
Wordsworth owed fealty, had not brooded upon Southey 
during boyhood ; the rich southern meadows, the wooded 
cliffs of Avon, the breezy downs, had nurtured his imagina- 
tion, and to these he was still bound by pieties of the heart. 
In the churchyard at Ashton, where lay his father and his 
kinsfolk, the beneficent cloud of mingled love and sorrow 
most overshadowed his spirit. His imagination did not 
soar, as did Wordsworth's, in nakpd solitudes ; he did not 
commune with a Presence immanent in external nature : 
the world, as he viewed it, was an admirable habitation for 
mankind — a habitation with a history. Even after he had 
grown a mountaineer, he loved a humanized landscape, one 
in which the gains of man's courage, toil, and endurance 
are apparent. Flanders, where the spade has wrought its 
miracles of diligence, where the slow canal -boat glides, 
where the carillons ripple from old spires, where sturdy 
burghers fought for freedom, and where vellum -bound 



84 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

quartos might be sought and found, Flanders, on the whole, 
gave Southey deeper and stronger feelings than did Switz- 
erland. The ideal land of his dreams was always Spain; 
the earthly paradise for him was Cintra, with its glory of 
sun, and a glow even in its depths of shadow. But as the 
years went by, Spain became more and more a memory, 
less and less a hope ; and the realities of life in his home 
were of more worth every day. When, in 1807, it grew 
clear that Greta Hall was to be his life-long place of abode, 
Southey's heart closed upon it with a tenacious grasp. He 
set the plasterer and carpenter to work ; he planted shrubs ; 
he enclosed the garden ; he gathered his books about him, 
and thought that here were materials for the industry of 
many years ; he held in his arms children who were born 
in this new home ; and he looked to Crosthwaite Church- 
yard, expecting, with quiet satisfaction, that when toil was 
ended he should there take his rest. 

" I don't talk much about these things," Southey writes ; 
" but these lakes and mountains give me a deep joy for 
which I suspect nothing elsewhere can compensate, and 
this is a feeling which time strengthens instead of weaken- 
ing." Some of the delights of southern counties he miss- 
ed ; his earliest and deepest recollections were connected 
with flowers ; both flowers and fruits were now too few ; 
there was not a cowslip to be found near Keswick. " Here 
in Cumberland I miss the nightingale and the violet — the 
most delightful bird and the sweetest flower." But for 
such losses there were compensations. A pastoral land 
will give amiable pledges for the seasons and the months, 
and will perform its engagements with a punctual observ- 
ance ; to this the mountains hardly condescend, but they 
shower at their will a sudden largess of unimagined beau- 
ty. Southey would sally out for a constitutional at his 



iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 85 

three-mile pace, the peaked cap slightly shadowing his 
eyes, which were coursing over the pages of a book held 
open as he walked ; he had left his study to obtain exer- 
cise, and so to preserve health ; he was not a laker engaged 
in view-hunting ; he did not affect the contemplative mood 
which at the time was not and could not be his. But when 
he raised his eyes, or when, quickening his three-mile to a 
four-mile pace, he closed the book, the beauty which lay 
around him liberated and soothed his spirit. This it did 
unfailingly ; and it might do more, for incalculable splen- 
dours, visionary glories, exaltations, terrors, are momentari- 
ly possible where mountain, and cloud, and wind, and sun- 
shine meet. Southey, as he says, did not talk much of 
these things, but they made life for him immeasurably 
better than it would have been in city confinement ; there 
were spaces, vistas, an atmosphere around his sphere of 
work, which lightened and relieved it. The engagements 
in his study were always so numerous and so full of inter- 
est that it needed an effort to leave the table piled with 
books and papers. But a May morning would draw him 
forth into the sun in spite of himself. Once abroad, 
Southey had a vigorous joy in the quickened blood, and 
the muscles impatient with energy long pent up. The 
streams were his especial delight ; he never tired of their 
deep retirement, their shy loveliness, and their melody ; 
they could often beguile him into an hour of idle medita- 
tion ; their beauty has in an especial degree passed into 
his verse. When his sailor brother Thomas came and set- 
tled in the Vale of Newlands, Southey would quickly cov- 
er the ground from Keswick at his four-mile pace, and in 
the beck at the bottom of Tom's fields, on summer days, 
he would plunge and re-plunge and act the river-god in 
the natural seats of mossy stone. Or he would be over- 



86 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

powered some autumn morning by the clamour of childish 
voices voting a holiday by acclamation. Their father must 
accompany them ; it would do him good, they knew it 
would ; they knew he did not take sufficient exercise, for 
they had heard him say so. Where should the scramble 
be ? To Skiddaw Dod, or Causey Pike, or Watenlath, or, 
as a compromise between their exuberant activity and his 
inclination for the chair and the fireside, to Walla Crag? 
And there, while his young companions opened their bas- 
kets and took their noonday meal, Southey would seat 
himself — as Westall has drawn him — upon the bough of 
an ash -tree, the water flowing smooth and green at his 
feet, but a little higher up broken, flashing, and whitening 
in its fall; and there in the still autumn noon he would 
muse happily, placidly, not now remembering with over- 
keen desire the gurgling tanks and fountains of Cintra, his 
Paradise of early manhood. 1 

On summer days, when the visits of friends, or strangers 
bearing letters of introduction, compelled him to idleness, 
Southey's more ambitious excursions were taken. But he 
was well aware that those who form acquaintance with a 
mountain region during a summer all blue and gold, know 
little of its finer power. It is October that brings most 
often those days faultless, pearl-pure, of affecting influence, 

" In the long year set 
Like captain jewels in the carcanet." 

Then, as Wordsworth has said, the atmosphere seems re- 
fined, and the sky rendered more crystalline, as the vivify- 
ing heat of the year abates ; the lights and shadows are 
more delicate ; the colouring is richer and more firmly 

1 For Westall's drawing, and the description of Walla Crag, see 
" Sir Thomas More :" Colloquy VI. 



iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 87 

harmonized ; and, in this season of stillness, the ear being 
unoccupied, or only gently excited, the sense of vision 
becomes more susceptible of its appropriate enjoyments. 
Even December is a better month than July for perceiving 
the special greatness of a mountainous country. When 
the snow lies on the fells soft and smooth, Grisedale Pike 
and Skiddaw drink in tints at morning and evening mar- 
vellous as those seen upon Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau for 
purity and richness. 

" Summer," writes Southey, " is not the season for this 
country. Coleridge says, and says well, that then it is like 
a theatre at noon. There are no goings on under a clear 
sky ; but at other seasons there is such shifting of shades, 
such islands of light, such columns and buttresses of sun- 
shine, as might almost make a painter burn his brushes, as 
the sorcerers did their books of magic when they saw the 
divinity which rested upon the apostles. The very snow, 
which you would perhaps think must monotonize the 
mountains, gives new varieties ; it brings out their recesses 
and designates all their inequalities ; it impresses a better 
feeling of their height ; and it reflects such tints of saffron, 
or fawn, or rose-colour to the evening sun. Maria 
Santissima ! Mount Horeb, with the glory upon its sum- 
mit, might have been more glorious, but not more beauti- 
ful than old Skiddaw in his winter pelisse. I will not 
quarrel with frost, though the fellow has the impudence 
to take me by the nose. The lake-side has such ten thou- 
sand charms : a fleece of snow or of the hoar-frost lies on 
the fallen trees or large stones ; the grass-points, that just 
peer above the water, are powdered with diamonds; the 
ice on the margin with chains of crystal, and such veins 
and wavy lines of beauty as mock all art ; and, to crown 
all, Coleridge and I have found out that stones thrown 



88 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

upon the lake when frozen make a noise like singing birds, 
and when you whirl on it a large flake of ice, away the 
shivers slide, chirping and warbling like a flight of finches." 
This tells of a February at Keswick; the following de- 
scribes the goings on under an autumn sky : — " The moun- 
tains on Thursday evening, before the sun was quite down, 
or the moon bright, were all of one dead-blue colour ; their 
rifts and rocks and swells and scars had all disappeared — 
the surface was perfectly uniform, nothing but the outline 
distinct; and this even surface of dead blue, from its un- 
natural uniformity, made them, though not transparent, 
appear transvious — as though they were of some soft or 
cloudy texture through which you could have passed. 
I never saw any appearance so perfectly unreal. Some- 
times a blazing sunset seems to steep them through and 
through with red light ; or it is a cloudy morning, and the 
sunshine slants down through a rift in the clouds, and the 
pillar of light makes the spot whereon it falls so emerald 
green, that it looks like a little field of Paradise. At night 
you lose the mountains, and the wind so stirs up the lake 
that it looks like the sea by moonlight." 

If Southey had not a companion by his side, the soli- 
tude of his ramble was unbroken ; he never had the knack 
of forgathering with chance acquaintance. With intellect- 
ual and moral boldness, and with high spirits, he united a 
constitutional bashfulness and reserve. His retired life, 
his habits of constant study, and, in later years, his short- 
ness of sight, fell in with this infirmity. He would not 
patronize his humbler neighbours ; he had a kind of imag- 
inative jealousy on behalf of their rights as independent 
persons ; and he could not be sure of straightway discover- 
ing, by any genius or instinct of good-fellowship, that com- 
mon ground whereon strangers are at home with one an- 



iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 89 

other. Hence — and Southey himself wished that it had 
been otherwise — long as he resided at Keswick, there were 
perhaps not twenty persons of the lower ranks whom he 
knew by sight. " After slightly returning the salutation 
of some passer-by," says his son, " he would again mechan- 
ically lift his cap as he heard some well-known name in 
reply to his inquiries, and look back with regret that the 
greeting had not been more cordial." 

If the ice were fairly broken, he found it natural to be 
easy and familiar, and by those whom he employed he was 
regarded with affectionate reverence. Mrs. Wilson — kind 
and generous creature — remained in Greta Hall tending the 
children as they grew up, until she died, grieved for by the 
whole household. Joseph Glover, who created the scare- 
crow " Statues " for the garden — male and female created 
he them, as the reader may see them figured toward the 
close of The Doctor — Glover, the artist who set up Edith's 
fantastic chimney-piece ("Well, Miss Southey," cried hon- 
est Joseph, "I've done my Devils"), was employed by 
Southey during five-and-twenty years, ever since he was a 
'prentice-boy. If any warm-hearted neighbour, known or 
unknown to him, came forward with a demand on South- 
ey's sympathies, he was sure to meet a neighbourly re- 
sponse. When the miller, who had never spoken to him 
before, invited the laureate to rejoice with him over the 
pig he had killed — the finest ever fattened — and when 
Southey was led to the place where that which had ceased 
to be pig and was not yet bacon, was hung up by the hind 
feet, he filled up the measure of the good man's joy by 
hearty appreciation of a porker's points. But Cumber- 
land enthusiasm seldom flames abroad with so prodigal a 
blaze as that of the worthy miller's heart. 

Within the charmed circle of home, Southey's temper 
Q 5 1 



90 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

and manners were full of a strong and sweet hilarity ; and 
the home circle was in itself a considerable group of per- 
sons. The Pantisocratic scheme of a community was, 
after all, near finding a fulfilment, only that the Greta ran 
by in place of the Susquehanna, and that Southey took 
upon his own shoulders the work of the dead Lovell, and 
of Coleridge, who lay in weakness and dejection, whelmed 
under the tide of dreams. For some little time Coleridge 
continued to reside at Keswick, an admirable companion 
in almost all moods of mind, for all kinds of wisdom, and 
all kinds of nonsense. When he was driven abroad in 
search of health, it seemed as if a brightness were gone 
out of the air, and the horizon of life had grown definite 
and contracted. " It is now almost ten years," Southey 
writes, " since he and I first met in my rooms at Oxford, 
which meeting decided the destiny of both. ... I am per- 
petually pained at thinking what he ought to be, . . . but 
the tidings of his death would come upon me more like 
a stroke of lightning than any evil I have ever yet endured." 
Mrs. Coleridge, with her children, remained at Greta 
Hall. That quaint little metaphysician, Hartley — now an- 
swering to the name of Moses, now to that of Job, the 
oddest of all God's creatures — was an unceasing wonder 
and delight to his uncle : "a strange, strange boy, * ex- 
quisitely wild,' an utter visionary, like the moon among 
thin clouds, he moves in a circle of his own making. He 
alone is a light of his own. Of all human beings I never 
saw one so utterly naked of self." When his father ex- 
pressed surprise that Hartley should take his pleasure of 
wheel-barrow-riding so sadly, " The pity is " — explained lit- 
tle Job — " the pity is, Fse always thinking of my thoughts." 
" ' I'm a boy of a very religious turn,' he says ; for he al- 
ways talks of himself and examines his own character, just 



iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 91 

as if he were speaking of another person, and as impar- 
tially. Every night he makes an extempore prayer aloud ; 
but it is always in bed, and not till he is comfortable there 
and got into the mood. When he is ready, he touches 
Mrs. Wilson, who sleeps with him, and says, ' Now listen !' 
and off he sets like a preacher." Younger than Hartley 
was Derwent Coleridge, a fair, broad-chested boy, with 
merry eye and roguish lips, now grown out of that yellow 
frock in which he had earned his name of Stumpy Canary. 
Sara Coleridge, when her uncle came to Keswick after the 
death of his own Margery, was a little grand-lama at that 
worshipful age of seven months. A fall into the Greta, a 
year and a half later, helped to change her to the delicate 
creature whose large blue eyes would look up timidly 
from under her lace border and mufflings of muslin. No 
feeling towards their father save a reverent loyalty did the 
Coleridge children ever learn under Southey's roof. But 
when the pale-faced wanderer returned from Italy, he sur- 
prised and froze his daughter by a sudden revelation of 
that jealousy which is the fond injustice of an unsatisfied 
heart, and which a child who has freely given and taken 
love finds it hard to comprehend. " I think my dear fa- 
ther," writes Sara Coleridge, " was anxious that I should 
learn to love him and the Wordsworths and their children, 
and not cling so exclusively to my mother and all around 
me at home." Love him and revere his memory she did ; 
to W T ordsworth she was conscious of owing more than to 
any other teacher or inspirer in matters of the intellect 
and imagination. But in matters of the heart and con- 
science the daily life of Southey was the book in which 
she read ; he was, she would emphatically declare, " upon 
the whole, the best man she had ever known." 

But the nepotism of the most " nepotious " uncle is 



92 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

not a perfect substitute for fatherhood with its hopes and 
fears. May-morning of the } T ear 1804 saw "an Edithling 
very, very ugly, with no more beauty than a young dodo," 
nestling by Edith Southey's side. A trembling thankful- 
ness possessed the little one's father; but when the Arc- 
tic weather changed suddenly to days of genial sunshine, 
and groves and gardens burst into living greenery, and 
rang with song, his heart was caught into the general joy. 
Southey was not without a presentiment that his young 
dodo would improve. Soon her premature activity of eye 
and spirits troubled him, and he tried, while cherishing 
her, to put a guard upon his heart. " I did not mean to 
trust my affections again on so frail a foundation — and 
yet the young one takes me from my desk and makes 
me talk nonsense as fluently as you perhaps can imagine." 
When Sara Coleridge — not yet five years old, but already, 
as she half believed, promised in marriage to Mr. De Quin- 
cey — returned after a short absence to Greta Hall, she saw 
her baby cousin, sixteen months younger, and therefore 
not yet marriageable, grown into a little girl very fair, 
with thick golden hair, and round, rosy cheeks. Edith 
Southey inherited something of her father's looks and of 
his swift intelligence ; with her growing beauty of face 
and limbs a growing excellence of inward nature kept 
pace. At twenty she was the " elegant cygnet " of Amelia 
Opie's album verses, 

" 'Twas pleasant to meet 
And see thee, famed Swan of the Derwent's fair tide, 
With that elegant cygnet that floats by thy side " — 

a compliment her father mischievously would not let her 
Elegancy forget. Those who would know her in the love- 
liness of youthful womanhood may turn to Wordsworth's 



iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 93 

poem, The Triad, where she appears first of the three " sis- 
ter nymphs " of Keswick and Rydal ; or, Hartley Cole- 
ridge's exquisite sonnet, To a lofty beauty, from her poor 
kinsman : 

" Methinks thy scornful mood, 
And bearing high of stately womanhood — 
Thy brow where Beauty sits to tyrannize 
O'er humble love, had made me sadly fear thee : 
For never sure was seen a royal bride, 
Whose gentleness gave grace to so much pride— 
My very thoughts would tremble to be near thee, 
But when I see thee by thy father's side 
Old times unqueen thee, and old loves endear thee." 

But it is best of all to remember Southey's daughter in 
connexion with one letter of her father's. In 1805 he 
visited Scotland alone ; he had looked forward to carry- 
ing on the most cherished purpose of his life — the Histo- 
ry of Portugal — among the libraries of Lisbon. But it 
would be difficult to induce Mrs. Southey to travel with 
the Edithling. Could he go alone ? The short absence in 
Scotland served to test his heart, and so to make his future 
clear : — 

" I need not tell you, my own dear Edith, not to read my 
letters aloud till you have first of all seen what is written 
only for yourself. What I have now to say to you is, that 
having been eight days from home, with as little discomfort, 
and as little reason for discomfort, as a man can reasonably 
expect, I have yet felt so little comfortable, so great sense of 
solitariness, and so many homeward yearnings, that certainly 
I will not go to Lisbon without you ; a resolution which, if 
your feelings be at all like mine, will not displease you. If, 
on mature consideration, you think the inconvenience of a 
voyage more than you ought to submit to, I must be content 
to stay in England, as on my part it certainly is not worth 



94 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

while to sacrifice a year's happiness ; for though not unhap- 
py (my mind is too active and too well disciplined to yield 
to any such criminal weakness), still, without you I am not 
happy. But for your sake as well as my own, and for little 
Edith's sake, I will not consent to any separation ; the growth 
of a year's love between her and me, if it please God that she 
should live, is a thing too delightful in itself, and too valua- 
ble in its consequences, both to her and me, to be given up 
for any light inconvenience either on your part or mine. An 
absence of a year would make her effectually forget me. . . . 
But of these things we will talk at leisure ; only, dear, dear 
Edith, we must not part." 

Such wisdom of the heart was justified; the year of 
growing love bore precious fruit. When Edith May was 
ten years old her father dedicated to her, in verses laden 
with a father's tenderest thoughts and feelings, his Tale of 
Paraguay. He recalls the day of her birth, the preceding 
sorrow for his first child, whose infant features have faded 
from him like a passing cloud ; the gladness of that sing- 
ing month of May; the seasons that followed during 
which he observed the dawning of the divine light in her 
eyes; the playful guiles by which he won from her re- 
peated kisses : to him these ten years seem like yesterday ; 
but to her they have brought discourse of reason, with the 
sense of time and change : — 

"And I have seen thine eyes suffused in grief 
When I have said that with autumnal grey 
The touch of old hath mark'd thy father's head ; 
That even the longest day of life is brief, 
And mine is falling fast into the yellow leaf." 

Other children followed, until a happy stir of life filled 
the house. Emma, the quietest of infants, whose voice 



iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 95 

was seldom heard, and whose dark-grey eyes too seldom 
shone in her father's study, slipped quietly out of the 
world after a hand's-breadth of existence ; but to Southey 
she was no more really lost than the buried brother and 
sister were to the cottage girl of Wordsworth's We are 
seven. "I have five children," he says in 1809; "three 
of them at home, and two under my mother's care in 
heaven." Of all, the most radiantly beautiful was Isabel ; 
the most passionately loved was Herbert. "My other 
two are the most perfect contrast you ever saw. Bertha, 
whom I call Queen Henry the Eighth, from her likeness 
to King Bluebeard, grows like Jonah's gourd, and is the 
very picture of robust health ; and little Kate hardly seems 
to grow at all, though perfectly well — she is round as a 
mushroom -button. Bertha, the bluff queen, is just as 
grave as Kate is garrulous; they are inseparable playfel- 
lows, and go about the house hand in hand." 

Among the inmates of Greta Hall, to overlook Lord 
Nelson and Bona Marietta, with their numerous successors, 
would be a grave delinquency. To be a cat, was to be a 
privileged member of the little republic to which Southey 
gave laws. Among the fragments at the end of The Doc- 
tor will be found a Chronicle History of the Cattery of 
Cat's Eden ; and some of Southey's frolic letters are writ- 
ten as if his whole business in life were that of secretary 
for feline affairs in Greta Hall. A house, he declared, is 
never perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there is in 
it a child rising three years old and a kitten rising six 
weeks ; " kitten is in the animal world what the rosebud 
is in the garden." Lord Nelson, an ugly specimen of the 
streaked-carroty or Judas-coloured kind, yet withal a good 
cat, affectionate, vigilant, and brave, was succeeded by Ma- 
dame Bianchi, a beautiful and singular creature, white, with 



96 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

a fine tabby tail ; " her wild eyes were bright, and green 
as the Duchess de Cadaval's emerald necklace." She fled 
away with her niece Pulcheria on the day when good old 
Mrs. Wilson died ; nor could any allurements induce the 
pair to domesticate themselves again. For some time a 
cloud of doom seemed to hang over Cat's Eden. Ovid and 
Virgil, Othello the Moor, and Pope Joan perished misera- 
bly. At last Fortune, as if to make amends for her un- 
kindness, sent to Greta Hall almost together the never-to- 
be-enough-praised Rumpelstilzchen (afterwards raised for 
services against rats to be His Serene Highness the Arch- 
duke Rumpelstilzchen), and the equally-to-be-praised Hur- 
ly-burlybuss. With whom too soon we must close the 
catalogue. 

The revenue to maintain this household was in the main 
won by Southey's pen. " It is a difficult as well as a deli- 
cate task," he wrote in the Quarterly Review, " to advise a 
youth of ardent mind and aspiring thoughts in the choice 
of a profession ; but a wise man will have no hesitation in 
exhorting him to choose anything rather than literature. 
Better that he should seek his fortune before the mast, or 
with a musket on his shoulder and a knapsack on his back ; 
better that he should follow the plough, or work at the 
loom or the lathe, or sweat over the anvil, than trust to lit- 
erature as the only means of his support." Southey's own 
bent towards literature was too strong to be altered. But, 
while he accepted loyally the burdens of his profession as 
a man of letters, he knew how stout a back is needed to 
bear them month after month and year after year. Ab- 
solutely dependent on his pen he was at no time. His 
generous friend Wynn, upon coming of age, allowed him 
annually 160/., until, in 1807, he was able to procure for 
Southey a Government pension for literary services amount- 



it.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 97 

ing, clear of taxes, to nearly the same sum. Southey had 
as truly as any man the pride of independence, but he had 
none of its vanity ; there was no humiliation in accepting 
a service from one whom friendship had made as close as 
a brother. Men, he says, are as much better for the good 
offices which they receive as for those they bestow ; and his 
own was no niggard hand. Knowing both to give and 
to take, with him the remembrance that he owed much to 
others was among the precious possessions of life which 
bind us to our kind with bonds of sonship, not of slavery. 
Of the many kindnesses which he received he never forgot 
one. " Had it not been for your aid," he writes to Wynn, 
forty years after their first meeting in Dean's Yard, " I 
should have been irretrievably wrecked when I ran upon 
the shoals, with all sail set, in the very outset of my voy- 
age." And to another good old friend, who from his own 
modest station applauded while Southey ran forward in 
the race : — " Do you suppose, Cottle, that I have forgotten 
those true and most essential acts of friendship which you 
showed me when I stood most in need of them? Your 
house was my house when I had no other. The very 
money with which I bought my wedding-ring and paid my 
marriage-fees was supplied by you. It was with your sis- 
ters I left Edith during my six months' absence, and for 
the six months after my return it was from you that I 
received, week by week, the little on which we lived, till I 
was enabled to live by other means. It is not the settling 
of a cash account that can cancel obligations like these. 
You are in the habit of preserving your letters, and if you 
were not, I would entreat you to preserve this, that it might 
be seen hereafter. . . . My head throbs and my eyes burn 
with these recollections. Good-night ! my dear old friend 
and benefactor." 
5* 



98 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

Anxiety about his worldly fortunes never cost Southey 
a sleepless night. His disposition was always hopeful ; 
relying on Providence, he says, I could rely upon myself. 
When he had little, he lived upon little, never spending 
when it was necessary to spare ; and his means grew with 
his expenses. Business habits he had none ; never in his 
life did he cast up an account; but in a general way he 
knew that money comes by honest toil and grows by dili- 
gent husbandry. Upon Mrs. Southey, who had an eye to 
all the household outgoings, the cares of this life fell more 
heavily. Sara Coleridge calls to mind her aunt as she 
moved about Greta Hall intent on house affairs, " with her 
fine figure and quietly commanding air." Alas ! under 
this gracious dignity of manner the wear and tear of life 
were doing their work surely. Still, it was honest wear 
and tear. " I never knew her to do an unkind act," says 
Southey, "nor say an unkind word;" but when stroke 
followed upon stroke of sorrow, they found her without 
that elastic temper which rises and recovers itself. Until 
the saddest of afflictions made her helpless, everything was 
left to her management, and was managed so quietly and 
well, that, except in times of sickness and bereavement, " I 
had," writes her husband, " literally no cares." Thus free 
from harass, Southey toiled in his library ; he toiled not 
for bread alone, but also for freedom. There were great 
designs before him which, he was well aware, if ever real- 
ized, would make but a poor return to the household cof- 
fer. To gain time and a vantage-ground for these, he was 
content to yield much of his strength to work of tempo- 
rary value, always contriving, however, to strike a mean in 
this journeyman service between what was most and least 
akin to his proper pursuits. When a parcel of books ar- 
rived from the Annual IZeview, he groaned in spirit over 



iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 99 

the sacrifice of time ; but patience ! it is, after all, better, 
he would reflect, than pleading in a court of law ; better 
than being called up at midnight to a patient; better 
than calculating profit and loss at a counter ; better, in 
short, than anything but independence. "I am a quiet, 
patient, easy-going hack of the mule breed " — he writes to 
Grosvenor Bedford — "regular as clock-work in my pace, 
sure-footed, bearing the burden which is laid on me, and 
only obstinate in choosing my own path. If Gifford 
could see me by this fireside, where, like Nicodemus, one 
candle suffices me in a large room, he would see a man in 
a coat ' still more threadbare than his own,' when he wrote 
his ' Imitation,' working hard and getting little — a bare 
maintenance, and hardly that ; writing poems and history 
for posterity with his whole heart and soul; one daily 
progressive in learning, not so learned as he is poor, not 
so poor as proud, not so proud as happy. Grosvenor, 
there is not a lighter-hearted nor a happier man upon the 
face of this wide world." When these words were writ- 
ten, Herbert stood by his father's side ; it was sweet to 
work that his boy might have his play-time glad and free. 
The public estimate of Southey's works as expressed in 
pounds, shillings, and pence, was lowest where he held that 
it ought to have been highest. For the History of Brazil, 
a work of stupendous toil, which no one in England could 
have produced save Southey himself, he had not received, 
after eight years, as much as for a single article in the 
Quarterly Review. Madoc, the pillar, as he supposed, on 
which his poetical fame was to rest ; Madoc, which he dis- 
missed with an awed feeling, as if in it he were parting 
with a great fragment of his life, brought its author, after 
twelve months' sales, the sum of 3/. 17s. Id. On the oth- 
er hand, for his Naval Biography, which interested him 



LofC* 



100 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

less than most of his works, and which was undertaken 
after hesitation, he was promised five hundred guineas a 
volume. Notwithstanding his unwearied exertions, his 
modest scale of expenditure, and his profitable connexion 
with the Quarterly Review — for an important article he 
would receive 100/. — he never had a year's income in ad- 
vance until that year, late in his life, in which Sir Robert 
Peel offered him a baronetcy. In 1818, the lucky pay- 
ment of a bad debt enabled him to buy 300/. in the 
Three-per-cents. "I have 100/. already there," he writes, 
"and shall then be worth 12/. per annum." By 1821 
this sum had grown to 625/., the gatherings of half a 
life-time. In that year his friend John May, whose ac- 
quaintance he had made in Portugal, and to whose kind- 
ness he was a debtor, suffered the loss of his fortune. As 
soon as South ey had heard the state of affairs, his decision 
was formed. " By this post," he tells his friend, " I write 
to Bedford, desiring that he will transfer to you 625/. in 
the Three-per-cents. I wish it was more, and that I had 
more at my command in any way. I shall in the spring, 
if I am paid for the first volume of my History as soon as 
it is finished. One hundred I should, at all events, have 
sent you then. It shall be as much more as I receive." 
And he goes on in cheery words to invite John May to 
break away from business and come to Keswick, there to 
lay in " a pleasant store of recollections which in all moods 
of mind are wholesome." One rejoices that Southey, 
poor of worldly goods, knew the happiness of being so 
simply and nobly generous. 

Blue and white china, mediaeval ivories, engravings by 
the Little Masters, Chippendale cabinets, did not excite 
pining desire in Southey's breast; yet in one direction 
he indulged the passion of a collector. If, with respect to 



iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803-1839. 101 

any of "the things independent of the will," he showed a 
want of moderation unworthy of his discipleship to Epic- 
tetus, it was assuredly with respect to books. Before he 
possessed a fixed home, he was already moored to his fo- 
lios; and when once he was fairly settled at Keswick, 
many a time the carriers on the London road found their 
lading the larger by a weighty packet on its way to Greta 
Hall. Never did he run north or south for a holiday, 
but the inevitable parcel preceded or followed his return. 
Never did he cross to the Continent but a bulkier bale ar- 
rived in its own good time, enclosing precious things. His 
morality, in all else void of offence, here yielded to the 
seducer. It is thought that Southey was in the main hon- 
est; but if Dirk Hatteraick had run ashore a hundred- 
weight of the Acta Sanctorum duty-free, the king's laure- 
ate was not the man to set the sharks upon him ; and it 
is to be feared that the pattern of probity, the virtuous 
Southey himself, might in such circumstances be found, 
under cover of night, lugging his prize landwards from its 
retreat beneath the rocks. Unquestionably, at one time 
certain parcels from Portugal — only of such a size as 
could be carried under the arm — were silently brought 
ashore to the defrauding of the revenue, and somehow 
found their way, by-and-by, to Greta Hall. "We main- 
tain a trade," says the Governor of the Strangers' House 
in Bacon's philosophical romance, " not for gold, silver, or 
jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices, nor any other com- 
modity of matter, but only for God's first creature, which 
was light.'''' Such, too, was Southey's trade, and be held 
that God's first creature is free to travel unchallenged by 
revenue-cutter. 

" Why, Montesinos," asks the ghostly Sir Thomas More 
in one of Southey's Colloquies, " with these books and the 



102 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

delight you take in their constant society, what have you 
to covet or desire ?" " Nothing," is the answer, " . . . ex- 
cept more books." When Southey, in 1805, went to see 
Walter Scott, it occurred to him in Edinburgh that, having 
had neither new coat nor hat since little Edith was born, 
he must surely be in want of both ; and here, in the me- 
tropolis of the North, was an opportunity of arraying him- 
self to his desire. " Howbeit," he says, " on considering 
the really respectable appearance which my old ones made 
for a traveller — and considering, moreover, that as learn- 
ing was better than house or land, it certainly must be 
much better than fine clothes — I laid out all my money 
in books, and came home to wear out my old wardrobe 
in the winter." De Quincey called Southey's library his 
wife, and in a certain sense it was wife and mistress and 
mother to him. The presence and enjoying of his books 
was not the sole delight they afforded ; there was also the 
pursuit, the surprisal, the love-making or wooing. And at 
last, in his hours of weakness, once more a little child, he 
would walk slowly round his library, looking at his cher- 
ished volumes, taking them down mechanically, and when 
he could no longer read, pressing them to his lips. In 
happier days the book-stalls of London knew the tall fig- 
ure, the rapid stride, the quick-seeing eye, the eager fin- 
gers. Lisbon, Paris, Milan, Amsterdam, contributed to 
the rich confusion that, from time to time, burdened the 
floors of library and bedrooms and passages in Greta Hall. 
Above all, he was remembered at Brussels by that best 
of bookmen, Verbeyst. What mattered it that Verbeyst 
was a sloven, now receiving his clients with gaping shirt, 
and now with stockingless feet? Did he not duly hon- 
our letters, and had he not 300,000 volumes from which 
to choose? If in a moment of prudential weakness one 



iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 108 

failed to carry off such a treasure as the Monumenta Boi- 
ca or Colgar's Irish Saints, there was a chance that in 
Verbeyst's vast store-house the volume might lurk for a 
year or two. And Verbeyst loved his books, only less 
than he loved his handsome, good-natured wife, who for 
a liberal customer would fetch the bread and burgundy. 
Henry Taylor dwelt in Kobert Southey's heart of hearts ; 
but let not Henry Taylor treasonably hint that Verbeyst, 
the prince of booksellers, had not a prince's politeness of 
punctuality. If sundry books promised had not arrived, 
it was because they were not easily procured; moreover, 
the good-natured wife had died — Men des malheurs, and 
Verbeyst's heart was fallen into a lethargy. " Think ill of 
our fathers which are in the Row, think ill of John Mur- 
ray, think ill of Colburn, think ill of the whole race of 
bibliopoles, except Verbeyst, who is always to be thought 
of with liking and respect." And when the bill of lading, 
coming slow but sure, announced that saints and chron- 
iclers and poets were on their way, " by this day month," 
wrote Southey, " they will probably be here ; then shall I 
be happier than if his Majesty King George the Fourth 
were to give orders that I should be clothed in purple, and 
sleep upon gold, and have a chain upon my neck, and sit 
next him because of my wisdom, and be called his cousin." 
Thus the four thousand volumes, which lay piled about 
the library when Southey first gathered his possessions 
together, grew and grew, year after year, until the grand 
total mounted up to eight, to ten, to fourteen thousand. 
Now Kirke White's brother Neville sends him a gift of 
Sir William Jones's works, thirteen volumes, in binding 
of bewildering loveliness. Now Landor ships from some 
Italian port a chest containing treasures of less dubious 
value than the Raffaelles and Leonardos, with which he lib- 



104 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

erally supplied his art -loving friends. Ob, the joy of 
opening such a chest ; of discovering the glorious folios ; 
of glancing with the shy amorousness of first desire at 
title-page and colophon ; of growing familiarity ; of trac- 
ing out the history suggested by book-plate or autograph ; 
of finding a lover's excuses for cropped margin, or water- 
stain, or worm-hole ! Then the calmer happiness of ar- 
ranging his favourites on new shelves ; of taking them 
down again, after supper, in the season of meditation and 
currant-rum ; and of wondering for which among his fa- 
ther's books Herbert will care most when all of them shall 
be his own. " It would please you," Southey writes to his 
old comrade, Bedford, "to see such a display of literary 
wealth, which is at once the pride- of my eye, and the joy 
of my heart, and the food of my mind ; indeed, more than 
metaphorically, meat, drink, and clothes for me and mine. 
I verily believe that no one in my station was ever so rich 
before, and I am very sure that no one in any station had 
ever a more thorough enjoyment of riches of any kind or 
in any way." 

Southey's Spanish and Portuguese collection — if Heber's 
great library be set aside — was probably the most remark- 
able gathering of such books in the possession of any 
private person in this country. It included several man- 
uscripts, some of which were displayed with due distinc- 
tion upon brackets. Books in white and gold — vellum or 
parchment bound, with gilt lettering in the old English 
type which Southey loved — were arranged in effective po- 
sitions pyramid - wise. Southey himself had learned the 
mystery of book-binding, and from him his daughters ac- 
quired that art ; the ragged volumes were decently clothed 
in coloured cotton prints; these, presenting a strange 
patch - work of colours, quite filled one room, which was 



iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 105 

known as the Cottonian Library. " Paul," a book-room on 
the ground-floor, had been so called because " Peter," the 
organ-room, was robbed to fit it with books. "Paul is 
a great comfort to us, and being dressed up with Peter's 
property, makes a most respectable appearance, and receives 
that attention which is generally shown to the youngest 
child. The study has not actually been Petered on Paul's 
account, but there has been an exchange negotiated which 
we think is for their mutual advantage. Twenty gilt vol- 
umes, from under the 'Beauties of England and Wales,' 
have been marched down -stairs rank and file, and their 
place supplied by the long set of Lope de Vega with green 
backs." 

Southey's books, as he assures his ghostly monitor in 
the Colloquies, were not drawn up on his shelves for dis- 
play, however much the pride of the eye might be gratified 
in beholding them ; they were on actual service. Gener- 
ations might pass away before some of them would again 
find a reader; in their mountain home they were prized 
and known as perhaps they never had been known before. 
Not a few of the volumes had been cast up from the wreck 
of family or convent libraries during the Revolution. 
"Yonder Acta Sanctorum belonged to the Capuchines at 
Ghent. This book of St. Bridget's Revelations, in which 
not only all the initial letters are illuminated, but every 
capital throughout the volume was coloured, came from 
the Carmelite Nunnery at Bruges. . . . Here are books 
from Colbert's library ; here others from the Lamoignon 
one. . . . Yonder Chronicle History of King D. Manoel, by 
Damiam de Goes; and yonder General History of Spain, 
by Esteban de Garibay, are signed by their respective au- 
thors. . . . This Copy of Casaubon's Epistles was sent to 
me from Florence by Walter Landor. He had perused it 



106 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

carefully, and to that perusal we are indebted for one of 
the most pleasing of his Conversations. . . . Here is a book 
with which Lauderdale amused himself, when Cromwell 
kept him in prison in "Windsor Castle. . . . Here I possess 
these gathered treasures of time, the harvest of many gen- 
erations, laid up in my garners: and when I go to the 
window, there is the lake, and the circle of the mountains, 
and the illimitable sky." 

Not a few of his books were dead, and to live among 
these was like living among the tombs j " Behold, this also 
is vanity," Southey makes confession. But when Sir Thom- 
as questions, "Has it proved to you 'vexation of spirit' 
also?" the Cumberland mountain-dweller breaks forth: 
" Oh no I for never can any man's life have been passed 
more in accord with his own inclinations, nor more an- 
swerably to his desires. Excepting that peace which, 
through God's infinite mercy, is derived from a higher 
source, it is to literature, humanly speaking, that I am be- 
holden, not only for the means of subsistence, but for 
every blessing which I enjoy ; health of mind and activity 
of mind, contentment, cheerfulness, continual employment, 
and therefore continual pleasure. Suavissima vita indies 
sentire se fieri meliorem ; and this, as Bacon has said and 
Clarendon repeated, is the benefit that a studious man en- 
joys in retirement." Such a grave gladness underlay all 
Southey's frolic moods, and in union with a clear-sighted 
acceptance of the conditions of human happiness — its in- 
evitable shocks, its transitory nature as far as it belongs to 
man's life on earth — made up part of his habitual temper. 

Southey coursed from page to page with a greyhound's 
speed ; a tiny s pencilled in the margin served to indicate 
what might be required for future use. Neatness he had 
learnt from Miss Tyler long ago ; and by experience he ac- 



it.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 107 

quired his method. On a slip of paper which served as 
marker he would note the pages to which he needed to re- 
turn. In the course of a few hours he had classified and 
arranged everything in a book which it was likely he 
would ever want. A reference to the less important pas- 
sages sufficed; those of special interest were transcribed 
by his wife, or one of his daughters, or more frequently 
by Southey himself ; finally, these transcripts were brought 
together in packets under such headings as would make it 
easy to discover any portion of their contents. 

Such was his ordinary manner of eviscerating an author, 
but it was otherwise with the writers of his affection. On 
some — such as Jackson and Jeremy Taylor — " he fed" as 
he expressed it, " slowly and carefully, dwelling on the 
page, and taking in its contents, deeply and deliberately, 
like an epicure with his wine ' searching the subtle fla- 
vour.' " Such chosen writers remained for all times and 
seasons faithful and cherished friends : — 

" With them I take delight in weal, 

And seek relief in woe ; 
And while I understand and feel 

How much to them I owe, 
My cheeks have often been bedewed 

With tears of thankful gratitude." 

"If I were confined to a score of English books," says 
Southey, " Sir Thomas Browne would, I think, be one of 
them ; nay, probably it would be one if the selection were 
cut down to twelve. My library, if reduced to those 
bounds, would consist of Shakspeare, Chaucer, Spenser, 
and Milton ; Jackson, Jeremy Taylor, and South ; Isaac 
Walton, Sidney's Arcadia, Fuller's Church History, and 
Sir Thomas Browne ; and what a wealthy and well-stored 



108 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

mind would that man have, what an inexhaustible reser- 
voir, what a Bank of England to draw upon for profitable 
thoughts and delightful associations, who should have fed 
upon them I" It must have gone hard with Southey, in 
making out this list, to exclude Clarendon, and doubtless 
if the choice were not limited to books written in English, 
the Utopia would have urged its claim to admission. With 
less difficulty he could skip the whole of the eighteenth 
century. From Samson Agonistes to The Task, there was 
no English poem which held a foremost place in his es- 
teem. Berkeley and Butler he valued highly ; but Robert 
South seemed to him the last of the race of the giants. 
An ancestral connection with Locke was not a source of 
pride to Southey; he respected neither the philosopher's 
politics nor his metaphysics ; still, it is pleasant, he says, to 
hear of somebody between one's self and Adam who has 
left a name. 

Four volumes of what are called Southey's Common- 
place Books have been published, containing some three 
thousand double-column pages ; and these are but a selec- 
tion from the total mass of his transcripts. It is impossi- 
ble to give a notion of a miscellany drawn from so wide- 
ranging a survey of poetry, biography, history, travels, to- 
pography, divinity, not in English alone, but also in Latin, 
French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese. Yet certain main 
lines can be traced which give some meaning to this huge 
accumulation. It is easy to perceive that the collector 
wrought under an historical bias, and that social, literary, 
and ecclesiastical history were the directions in which the 
historical tendency found its play. Such work of tran- 
scribing, though it did not rest Southey's hand, was a re- 
lief to his mind after the excitement of composition, and 
some of it may pass for a kind of busy idleness ; but most 



iv.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 109 

of his transcripts were made with a definite purpose — that 
of furnishing materials for work either actually accomplish^ 
ed or still in prospect, when at last the brain grew dull 
and the fingers slack. " I am for ever making collections," 
he writes, " and storing up materials which may not come 
into use till the Greek Calends. And this I have been do^ 
ing for five-and-twenty years ! It is true that I draw daily 
upon my hoards, and should be poor without them ; but 
in prudence I ought now to be working up those materials 
rather than adding to so much dead stock." When Tick- 
nor visited him in 1819, Southey opened for the young 
American his great bundles of manuscript materials for the 
History of Portugal, and the History of the Portuguese 
East Indies. Southey had charmed him by the kindness 
of his reception ; by the air of culture and of goodness in 
his home ; by his talk, bright and eager, " for the quickness 
of his mind expresses itself in the fluency of his utterance ; 
and yet he is ready upon almost any subject that can be 
proposed to him, from the extent of his knowledge." And 
now, when Ticknor saw spread before him the evidence 
of such unexampled industry, a kind of bewilderment took 
possession of him. " Southey," he writes in his diary, " is 
certainly an extraordinary man, one of those whose char- 
acters I find it difficult to comprehend, because I hardly 
know how such elements can be brought together, such ra- 
pidity of mind with such patient labour and wearisome ex- 
actness, so mild a disposition with so much nervous excita- 
bility, and a poetical talent so elevated with such an im- 
mense mass of minute, dull learning." 

If Ticknor had been told that this was due to Epictetus, 
it might have puzzled him still more ; but it is certain that 
only through the strenuous appliance of will to the forma- 
tion of character could Southey have grown to be what he 



110 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

was. He had early been possessed by the belief that he 
must not permit himself to become the slave or the victim 
of sensibility, but that in the little world of man there are 
two powers ruling by a Divine right — reason and con- 
science, in loyal obedience to which lies our highest free- 
dom. Then, too, the circumstances of his life prompted 
him to self-mastery and self-management. That he should 
every day overtake a vast amount of work, was not left to 
his choosing or declining — it was a matter of necessity ; to 
accomplish this, he must get all possible advantage out of 
his rapidity of intellect and his energy of feeling, and at 
the same time he must never put an injurious strain on 
these. It would not do for Southey to burn away to-day 
in some white flame of excitement the nerve which he 
needed for use to-morrow. He could not afford to pass 
a sleepless night. If his face glowed or his brain throb- 
bed, it was a warning that he had gone far enough. His 
very susceptibility to nervous excitement rendered caution 
the more requisite. William Taylor had compared him 
to the mimosa. Hazlitt remembered him with a quiver- 
ing lip, a hectic flush upon his cheek, a roving fire in his 
eye, a falcon glance, a look at once aspiring and dejected. 
Crabb Robinson found in him a likeness to Shelley. 
Humphry Davy had proved the fineness of his sensibility 
by that odd neurometer, the nitrous oxide. " The truth 
is," writes Southey, " that though some persons, whose 
knowledge of me is scarcely skin-deep, suppose I have no 
nerves, because I have great self-control as far as regards 
the surface, if it were not for great self-management, and 
what may be called a strict intellectual regimen, I should 
very soon be in a deplorable state of what is called nervous 
disease, and this would have been the case any time during 
the last twenty years." And again : " A man had better 



it.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. Ill 

break a bone, or even lose a limb, than shake his nervous sys- 
tem. I, who never talk about my nerves (and am supposed 
to have none by persons who see as far into me as they do 
•into a stone wall), know this." Southey could not afford 
to play away his health at hazard, and then win it back in 
the lounge of some foreign watering-place. His plan, on 
the contrary, was to keep it, and to think about it as little 
as possible. A single prescription sufficed for a life-time 
— In labore quies. " I think I may lay claim," he says, 
" to the praise of self -management both in body and mind 
without paying too much attention to either — exercising a 
diseased watchfulness, or playing any tricks with either." 
It would not have been difficult for Southey, with such a 
temperament as his, to have wrecked himself at the outset 
of his career. With beautiful foiled lives of young men 
Southey had a peculiar sympathy. But the gods some- 
times give white hairs as an aureole to their favoured 
ones. Perhaps, on the whole, for him it was not only 
more prudent but also more chivalrous to study to be 
quiet ; to create a home for those who looked to him for 
security; to guard the happiness of tender women; to 
make smooth ways for the feet of little children ; to hold 
hands in old age with the friends of his youth; to store 
his mind with treasures of knowledge ; to strengthen and 
chasten his own heart; to grow yearly in love for his 
country and her venerable heritage of manners, virtue, 
laws ; to add to her literature the outcome of an adult in- 
tellect and character ; and having fought a strenuous and 
skilful fight, to fall as one whose sword an untimely stroke 
has shattered in his hand. 



CHAPTER V. 

ways OF life at keswick, 1803 — 1839 (continued). 

The texture of Southey's life was so uniform, the round 
from morning till night repeated itself with so much reg- 
ularity, that one day may stand as representative of a 
thousand. We possess his record of how the waking 
hours went by when he was about thirty years old, and 
a similar record written when he was twice that age. His 
surroundings had changed in the mean time, and he him- 
self had changed; the great bare room which he used 
from the first as a study, fresh plastered in 1804, with the 
trowel-lines on the ceiling pierced by the flaws of winter, 
containing two chairs and a little table — " God help me !" 
he exclaims, " I look in it like a cock-robin in a church " 
— this room had received, long before 1834, its lining of 
comely books, its white and gold pyramids, its brackets, 
its cherished portraits. The occupant of the study had 
the same spare frame, the same aspect of lightness and of 
strength, the same full eyebrows shadowing the dark- 
brown eyes, the same variously expressive muscular mouth ; 
the youthful wildness in his countenance had given place 
to a thoughtful expression, and the abundant hair still 
clustering over his great brow was snowy white. What- 
ever had changed, his habits — though never his tyrants — 
remained, with some variations in detail, the same. " My 



chap, v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 113 

actions," lie writes to a friend not very long after his ar- 
rival in Keswick, " are as regular as those of St. Dunstan's 
quarter -boys. Three pages of history after breakfast 
(equivalent to five in small quarto printing); then to 
transcribe and copy for the press, or to make my selec- 
tions and biographies, or what else suits my humour till 
dinner-time; from dinner to tea I read, write letters, see 
the newspaper, and very often indulge in a siesta — for 
sleep agrees with me. . . . After tea I go to poetry, and 
correct, and rewrite, and copy till I am tired, and then 
turn to anything else till supper; and this is my life — 
which, if it be not a very merry one, is yet as happy as 
heart could wish." " See how the day is disposed of !" 
begins the later record ; " I get out of bed as the clock 
strikes six, and shut the house-door after me as it strikes 
seven. 1 After two hours with Davies, home to breakfast, 
after which Cuthbert engages me till about half -past ten, 
and when the post brings no letters that either interest 
or trouble me (for of the latter I have many), by eleven I 
have done with the newspaper, and can then set about 
what is properly the business of the day. But letters 
are often to be written, and I am liable to frequent inter- 
ruptions ; so that there are not many mornings in which 
I can command from two to three unbroken hours at the 
desk. At two I take my daily walk, be the weather what 
it may, and when the weather permits, with a book in my 
hand ; dinner at four, read about half an hour ; then take 
to the sofa with a different book, and after a few pages 
get my soundest sleep, till summoned to tea at six. My 
best time during the winter is by candle-light; twilight 

1 /. c, to go to Davies' lodgings ; Davies, Dr. Bell's Secretary, was 
engaged in arranging a vast accumulation of papers with a view to 
forwarding Southey in his Life of Bell. 
6 



114 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

interferes with it a little; and in the season of company 
I can never count upon an evening's work. Supper at 
half -past nine, after which I read an hour, and then to 
bed. The greatest part of my miscellaneous work is done 
in the odds and ends of time." 

It was part of Southey's regimen to carry on several 
works at once ; this he found to be economy of time, and 
he believed it necessary for the preservation of his health. 
Whenever one object entirely occupied his attention, it 
haunted him, oppressed him, troubled his dreams. The 
remedy was simple — to do one thing in the morning, an- 
other in the evening. To lay down poetry and presently 
to attack history seems feasible, and no ill policy for one 
who is forced to take all he can out of himself; but 
Southey would turn from one poetical theme to another, 
and could day by day advance with a pair of epics. This 
was a source of unfailing wonder to Landor. "When I 
write a poem," he says, " my heart and all my feelings are 
upon it. . . . High poems will not admit flirtation." Lit- 
tle by little was Southey's way, and so he got on with 
many things. " Last night," he writes to Bedford, " I be- 
gan the Preface [to Specimens of English Poets] — huz- 
za ! And now, Grosvenor, let me tell you what I have to 
do. I am writing — 1. The History of Portugal ; 2. The 
Chronicle of the Cid ; 3. The Curse of Kehama ; 4. Es- 
prielld's Letters. Look you, all these / am writing. . . . 
By way of interlude comes in this preface. Don't swear, 
and bid me do one thing at a time. I tell you I can't 
afford to do one thing at a time — no, nor two neither; 
and it is only by doing many things that I contrive to do 
so much: for I cannot work long together at anything 
without hurting myself, and so I do everything by heats ; 
then, by the time I am tired of one, my inclination for 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 115 

another is come round." A strong, deliberate energy, ac- 
cordingly, is at the back of all Southey's work ; but not 
that blind creative rapture which will have its own way, 
and leaves its subject weak but appeased. " In the day- 
time I laboured," says Landor, " and at night unburdened 
my soul, shedding many tears. My Tiberius has so shaken 
me at last that the least thing affects me violently." 
Southey shrank back from such agitations. A great Eliz- 
abethan poet is described by one of his contemporaries as 
one standing 

" Up to the chin in the Pierian flood." 

Southey did not wade so far; he stepped down calmly 
until the smooth waters touched his waist; dipped seven 
times, and returned to the bank. It was a beautiful and 
an elevating rite ; but the waves sing with lyric lips only 
in the midmost stream ; and he who sings with them, and 
as swift as they, need not wonder if he sink after a time, 
faint, breathless, delighted. 

Authorship, it must be remembered, was Southey's trade, 
the business of his life, and this, at least, he knew how to 
conduct well. To be a prophet and call down flame from 
heaven, and disappear in a whirlwind and a chariot of fire, 
is sublime ; but prophets can go in the strength of a sin- 
gle meal for more days and nights than one would choose 
to name in this incredulous age, and, if they eat, there are 
ravens to bring them food. No ravens brought loaves to 
Greta Hall ; and Southey had an unprophet - like craving 
for the creature comforts of beef and bread, for wine if it 
might be had, and at supper for one meditative tumbler 
of punch or black-currant rum. Besides, what ravens 
were ever pledged to feed a prophet's sisters-in-law, or his 
nephews and nieces ? Let it be praise enough for much 



116 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

of Southey's performance that lie did good work in work- 
manlike fashion. To shift knowledge into more conven- 
ient positions is to render no unimportant service to man- 
kind. In the gathering of facts, Southey was both swift 
and patient in an extraordinary degree ; he went often 
alone, and he went far ; in the art of exposition he was 
unsurpassed ; and his fine moral feeling and profound 
sympathy with elementary justice created, as De Quincey 
has observed, a soul under what else might well be denom- 
inated, Miltonically, " the ribs of death." From the mend- 
ing of his pens to the second reading aloud of his proof- 
sheets, attending as he read to the fall of each word upon 
the ear, Southey had a diligent care for everything that 
served to make his work right. He wrote at a moderate 
pace; re-wrote; wrote a third time if it seemed desirable; 
corrected with minute supervision. He accomplished so 
much, not because he produced with unexampled rapidity, 
but because he worked regularly, and never fell into a 
mood of apathy or ennui. No periods of tempestuous 
vacancy lay between his periods of patient labour. One 
work always overlapped another — thus, that first idle day, 
the begetter of so many idle descendants, never came. 
But let us hear the craftsman giving a lesson in the knack 
of authorship to his brother, Dr. Henry Southey, who has 
a notion of writing something on the Crusades : 

" Now then, supposing that you will seriously set about 
the Crusades, I will give you such directions in the art of his- 
torical book-keeping as may save time and facilitate labour. 

" Make your writing-books in foolscap quarto, and write 
on only one side of a leaf; draw a line down the margin, 
marking off space enough for your references, which should 
be given at the end of every paragraph ; noting page, book, 
or chapter of the author referred to. This minuteness is now 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839: 117 

demanded, and you will yourself find it useful ; for, in tran- 
scribing or in correcting proofs, it is often requisite to turn to 
the original authorities. Take the best author; that is to 
say, the one that has written most at length of all the original 
authors, upon the particular point of time on which you are 
employed, and draw up your account from him ; then, on the 
opposite page, correct and amplify this from every other who 
has written on the same subject. This page should be di- 
vided into two columns, one of about two-thirds of its breadth, 
the other the remaining one. You are thus enabled to add 
to your additions. 

" One of these books you should have for your geography ; 
that is to say, for collecting descriptions of all the principal 
scenes of action (which must be done from books of travels), 
their situation, their strength, their previous history, and in 
the notes, their present state. [Another book — he adds in a 
subsequent letter — you must keep for the bibliography of 
your subject.] 

" These descriptions you can insert in their proper places 
when you transcribe. Thus, also, you should collect accounts 
of the different tribes and dynasties which you have occasion 
to mention. In this manner the information which is only 
to be got at piecemeal, and oftentimes incidentally, when you 
are looking for something else, is brought together with least 
trouble, and almost imperceptibly. 

"All relative matter not absolutely essential to the subject 
should go in the form of supplementary notes, and these you 
may make as amusing as you please, the more so, and the 
more curious, the better. Much trouble is saved by writing 
them on separate bits of paper, each the half of a quarter of 
a foolscap sheet — numbering them, and making an index of 
them ; in this manner they are ready for use when they are 
wanted. 

" It was some time before I fell unto this system of book- 
keeping, and I believe no better can be desired. A Welsh 
triad might comprehend all the rules of style. Say what you 



118 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

have to say as perspicuously as possible, as "briefly as possible, 
and as remeinberdbly as possible, and take no other thought 
about it. Omit none of those little circumstances which 
give life to narration, and bring old manners, old feelings, 
and old times before your eyes.*' 

Winter was Southey's harvest season. Then for weeks 
no visitor knocked at Greta Hall, except perhaps Mr. 
Wordsworth, who had plodded all the way from Rydal on 
his indefatigable legs. But in summer interruptions were 
frequent, and Southey, who had time for everything, had 
time to spare not only for friends but for strangers. The 
swarm of lakers was, indeed, not what it is now-a-days, but 
to a studious man it was, perhaps, not less formidable. By 
Gray's time the secret of the lakes had been found out ; 
and if the visitors were fewer, they were less swift upon 
the wing, and their rank or fame often entitled them to 
particular attention. Coroneted coaches rolled into Kes- 
wick, luo-aaofe-laden ; the American arrived sometimes to 
make sure that Derwentwater would not be missed out of 
Lake Michigan, sometimes to see King George's laureate ; 
and cultured Americans were particularly welcome to 
Southey. Long-vacation reading-parties from Oxford and 
Cambridge — known among the good Cumberland folk as 
the "cathedrals" — made Keswick a resort. Well for 
them if, provided with an introduction, they were invited 
to dine at Greta Hall, were permitted to gaze on the 
choice old Spaniards, and to converse with the laureate's 
stately Edith and her learned cousin. Woe to them if, 
after the entanglements of a Greek chorus or descriptions 
of the temperate man and the magnanimous man, they 
sought to restore their tone by a cat-worrying expedition 
among the cottages of Keswick. Southey's cheek glowed, 
his eye darkened and flashed, if he chanced to witness cru- 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 119 

elty ; some of the Cambridge " cathedrals " who received 
a letter concerning cats in July, 1834, may still bear the 
mark of its leaded thong in their moral fibre, and be the 
better for possessing Southey's sign-manual. 

A young step-child of Oxford visited Keswick in the 
winter of 1811-12, and sought the acquaintance of the 
author of Thalaba. Had Southey been as intolerant or 
as unsympathetic as some have represented him, he could 
not have endured the society of one so alien in opinion 
and so outspoken as Shelley. But courtesy, if it were 
nothing more, was at least part of Southey's self-respect ; 
his intolerance towards persons was, in truth, towards a 
certain ideal, a certain group of opinions; when hand 
touched hand and eye met eye, all intolerance vanished, 
and he was open to every gracious attraction of character 
and manner. There was much in Shelley that could not 
fail to interest Southey ; both loved poetry, and both felt 
the proud, secluded grandeur of Landor's verse ; both loved 
men, and thought the world wants mending, though their 
plans of reform might differ. That Shelley was a rebel 
expelled from Oxford did not shock Southey, who him- 
self had been expelled from Westminster and rejected at 
Christ Church. Shelley's opinions were crude and violent, 
but their spirit was generous, and such opinions held by 
a youth in his teens generally mean no more than that 
his brain is working and his heart ardent. Shelley's rash 
marriage reminded Southey of another marriage, celebrated 
at Bristol some fifteen years ago, which proved that rash- 
ness is not always folly. The young man's admiration of 
Thalaba spoke well for him; and certainly during the 
earlier weeks of their intercourse there was on Shelley's 
part a becoming deference to one so much his superior in 
years and in learning, deference to one who had achieved 



120 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

much while Shelley still only dreamed of achievement. 
Southey thought he saw in the revolutionary enthusiast 
an image of his former self. " Here," he says, " is a man 
at Keswick who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. 
He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son 
to the member for Shoreham. ... At present he has got 
to the Pantheistic stage of philosophy, and in the course 
of a week I expect he will be a Berkeleyan, for I have put 
him upon a course of Berkeley. It has surprised him a 
good deal to meet, for the first time in his life, with a man 
who perfectly understands him and does him full justice. 
I tell him that all the difference between us is that he is 
nineteen and I am thirty-seven ; and I daresay it will not 
be very long before I shall succeed in convincing him that 
he may be a true philosopher and do a great deal of good 
with 6000Z. a year; the thought of which troubles him a 
great deal more at present than ever the want of sixpence 
(for I have known such a want) did me." There were 
other differences between Robert Southey and the incon- 
stant star that passed by Greta Hall than that of years. 
Southey had quickly learned to put a bound to his desires, 
and within that bound to work out for himself a posses- 
sion of measureless worth. It seemed to him part of a 
man's virtue to adhere loyally to the bond signed for each 
of us when we enter life. Is our knowledge limited — 
then let us strive within those limits. Can we never lay 
hands on the absolute good — then let us cherish the good 
things that are ours. Do we hold our dearest possessions 
on a limited tenure — that is hard, but is it not in the 
bond ? How faint a loyalty is his who merely yields obe- 
dience perforce ! let us rather cast in our will, unadulterate 
and whole, with that of our divine Leader ; sursum corda 
— there is a heaven above. But Shelley — the nympholept 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 121 

of some radiant ante-natal sphere — fled through his brief 
years ever in pursuit of his lost lady of light ; and for him 
loyalty to the bond of life seemed to mean a readiness to 
forget all things, however cherished, so soon as they had 
fulfilled their service of speeding him on towards the un- 
attainable. It could not but be that men living under 
rules so diverse should before long find themselves far 
asunder. But they parted in 1812 in no spirit of ill-will. 
Southey was already a state-pensioner and a champion of 
the party of order in the Quarterly Review; this did not 
prevent the young apostle of liberty and fraternity from 
entering his doors, and enjoying Mrs. Southey's tea-cakes. 
Irish affairs were earnestly discussed ; but Southey, who 
had written generously of Emmett both in his verse and 
in the Quarterly, could not be hostile to one whose illu- 
sions were only over - sanguine ; and while the veritable 
Southey was before Shelley's eyes, he could not discern 
the dull hireling, the venomous apostate, the cold-blooded 
assassin, of freedom conjured up by Byron and others to 
bear Southey's name. 

Three years later Shelley presented his Alastor to the 
laureate, and Southey duly acknowledged the gift. The 
elder poet was never slow to recognize genius in young 
men, but conduct was to him of higher importance than 
genius; he deplored some acts in Shelley's life which 
seemed to result directly from opinions professed at Kes- 
wick in 1811 — opinions then interpreted as no more than 
the disdain of checks felt by every spirited boy. Southey 
heard no more from him until a letter came from Pisa in- 
quiring whether Shelley's former entertainer at Keswick 
were his recent critic of the Quarterly Review, with added 
comments, courteous but severe, on Southey's opinions. 
The reply was that Southey had not written the paper, and 
I 6* y 



122 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

had never in any of his writings alluded to Shelley in any 
way. A second letter followed on each side, the elder 
man pleading, exhorting, warning; the younger justifying 
himself, and returning to the attack. " There the corre- 
spondence ended. On Shelley's part it was conducted with 
the courtesy which was natural to him ; on mine, in the 
spirit of one who was earnestly admonishing a fellow- 
creature." 

Much of Southey's time — his most valued possession — 
was given to his correspondents. Napoleon's plan of an- 
swering letters, according to Bourrienne, was to let them 
lie unopened for six weeks, by which time nine out of ten 
had answered themselves, or had been answered by his- 
tory. Coleridge's plan — says De Quincey — was shorter; 
he opened none, and answered none. To answer all forth- 
with was the habit of Southey. Thinking doubtless of 
their differences in such minor moralities of life, Coleridge 
writes of his brother - in - law : — " Always employed, his 
friends find him always at leisure. No less punctual in 
trifles than steadfast in the performance of highest duties, 
he inflicts none of those small pains which irregular men 
scatter about them, and which in the aggregate so often 
become formidable obstacles both to happiness and utility ; 
while, on the contrary, he bestows all the pleasures and in- 
spires all that ease of mind on those around or connected 
with him, which perfect consistency and (if such a word 
might be framed) absolute reliability^ equally in small as 
in great concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow ; when 
this, too, is softened without being weakened by kindness 
and gentleness/' Odd indeed were some of the communi- 
cations for which the poet-laureate, the Tory reformer, and 
the loyal son of the Church was the mark. Now a clergy- 
man writes to furnish him with Scriptural illustrations of 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 123 

Thalaba ; now another clergyman favours him with an 
ingenious parallel between Kehama and Nebuchadnezzar; 
now some anonymous person seriously urges on Southey 
his duty of making a new version of the Psalms, and lay- 
ing it before the King to be approved and appointed to 
be sung in churches ; now a lunatic poet desires his broth- 
er to procure for his title-page the names of Messrs. Long- 
man and Rees ; now a poor woman, wife to a blind Homer, 
would have him led carefully to the summit of Parnassus ; 
now a poor French devil volunteers to translate Roderick 
if the author will have the goodness to send him a copy 
— even a defective copy — which he pledges himself re- 
ligiously to return ; now a Yankee, who keeps an exhibition 
at Philadelphia, modestly asks for Southey's painted por- 
trait, " which is very worthy a place in my collection ;" 
now a herdsman in the vale of Clwyd requests permission 
to send specimens of prose and verse — his highest ambi- 
tion is the acquaintance of learned men ; now the Rev. 
Peter Hall begs to inform Southey that he has done more 
harm to the cause of religion than any writer of the age ; 
now a lover requests him to make an acrostic on the name 
of a young lady — the lover's rival has beaten him in writ- 
ing verses; enclosed is the honorarium. Southey's ami- 
ability at this point gave way ; he did not write the acros- 
tic, and the money he spent on blankets for poor women 
in Keswick. A society for the suppression of albums was 
proposed by Southey ; yet sometimes he was captured in 
the gracious mood. Samuel Simpson, of Liverpool, begs 
for a few lines in his handwriting " to fill a vacancy in his 
collection of autographs, without which his series must re- 
main for ever most incomplete." The laureate replies : 
" Inasmuch as you Sam, a descendant of Sim, 
For collecting handwritings have taken a whim, 



124 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

And to me, Robert Southey, petition have made, 
In a civil and nicely-penned letter — post-paid — 
That I to your album so gracious would be 
As to fill up a page there appointed for me, 
Five couplets I send you, by aid of the Nine — 
They will cost you in postage a penny a line : 
At Keswick, October the sixth, they were done, 
One thousand eight hundred and twenty and one." 

Some of Southey's distractions were of his own inviting. 
Soon after his arrival at Keswick, a tiny volume of poems, 
entitled Clifton Grove, attracted his attention ; its author 
was an undergraduate of Cambridge. The Monthly Re- 
view having made the discovery that it rhymed in one 
place boy and sky, dismissed the book contemptuously. 
Southey could not bear to think that the hopes of a lad of 
promise should be blasted, and he wrote to Henry Kirke 
White, encouraging him, and offering him help towards a 
future volume. The cruel dulness of the reviewer sat heav- 
ily on the poor boy's spirits, and these unexpected words 
of cheer came with most grateful effect. It soon appeared, 
however, that Southey's services must be slight, for his new 
acquaintance was taken out of his hands by Mr. Simeon, 
the nursing - father of Evangelicalism. At no time had 
Southey any leanings towards the Clapham Sect ; and so, 
while he tried to be of use to Kirke White indirectly, their 
correspondence ceased. When the lad, in every way lack- 
ing pith and substance, and ripening prematurely in a heat- 
ed atmosphere, drooped and died, Southey was not willing 
that he should be altogether forgotten ; he wrote offering 
to look over whatever papers there might be, and to give 
an opinion on them. " Down came a box-full," he tells Dup- 
pa, " the sight of which literally made my heart ache and 
my eyes overflow, for never did I behold such proofs of hu- 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 125 

man industry. To make short, I took the matter up with 
interest, collected his letters, and have, at the expense of 
more time than such a poor fellow as myself can very well 
afford, done what his family are very grateful for, and what 
I think the world will thank me for too. Of course I 
have done it gratuitously. . . . That I should become, and 
that voluntarily too, an editor of Methodistical and Calvin- 
istic letters, is a thing which, when I think of, excites the 
same sort of smile that the thought of my pension does." 
A brief statement that his own views on religion differed 
widely from those of Kirke White sufficed to save South- 
ey' s integrity. The genius of the dead poet he overrated ; 
it was an error which the world has since found time to 
correct. 

This was but one of a series of many instances in which 
South ey, stemming the pressure of his own engagements, 
asserted the right to be generous of his time and strength 
and substance to those who had need of such help as a 
sound heart and a strong arm can give. William Roberts, 
a Bristol bank-clerk, dying of consumption at nineteen, left 
his only possession, some manuscript poems, in trust to be 
published for the benefit of a sister whom he passionately 
loved. Southey was consulted, and at once bestirred him- 
self on behalf of the projected volume. Herbert Knowles, 
an orphan lad at school in Yorkshire, had hoped to go 
as a sizar to St. John's ; his relations were unable to send 
him ; could he help himself by publishing a poem ? might 
he dedicate it to the laureate ? The poem came to Southey, 
who found it " brimful of power and of promise ;" he rep- 
resented to Herbert the folly of publishing, promised ten 
pounds himself, and procured from Rogers and Earl Spen- 
cer twenty more. Herbert Knowles, in a wise and manly 
letter, begged that great things might not be expected of 



126 SOUTHEY. [chap 

him ; he would not be idle, his University career should be 
at least respectable : — " Suffice it, then, to say, / thank you 
from my heart; let time and my future conduct tell the 
rest." Death came to arbitrate between his hopes and 
fears. James Dusautoy, another schoolboy, one of ten chil- 
dren of a retired officer, sent specimens of his verse, asking 
Southey's opinion on certain poetical plans. His friends 
thought the law the best profession for him ; how could 
he make literature help him forward in his profession? 
Southey again advised against publication, but by a well- 
timed effort enabled him to enter Emanuel College. Du- 
sautoy, after a brilliant promise, took fever, died, and was 
buried, in acknowledgment of his character and talents, in 
the college cloisters. When at Harrogate in the summer 
of 1827, Southey received a letter, written with much mod- 
esty and good feeling, from John Jones, an old serving- 
man ; he enclosed a poem on " The Redbreast," and would 
take the liberty, if permitted, to offer other manuscripts 
for inspection. Touches of true observation and natural 
feeling in the verses on the little bird with " look oblique 
and prying head and gentle affability " pleased Southey, 
and he told his humble applicant to send his manuscript 
book, warning him, however, not to expect that such poems 
would please the public — " the time for them was gone by, 
and whether the public had grown wiser in these matters 
or not, it had certainly become less tolerant and less char- 
itable." By procuring subscribers and himself contrib- 
uting an Introductory Essay on the lives and works of our 
Uneducated Poets, Southey secured a slender fortune for 
the worthy old man, who laid the table none the less punct- 
ually because he loved Shakspeare and the Psalter, or carried 
in his head some simple rhymes of his own. It pleased 
Southey to show how much intellectual pleasure and moral 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 12V 

improvement connected with such pleasure are within reach 
of the humblest ; thus a lesson was afforded to those who 
would have the March of Intellect beaten only to the tune 
of Qa ira. "Before I conclude" — so the Introduction 
draws to an end — " I must, in my own behalf, give notice 
to all whom it may concern that I, Robert Southey, Poet- 
laureate, being somewhat advanced in years, and having 
business enough of my own fully to occupy as much time 
as can be devoted to it, consistently with a due regard to 
health, do hereby decline perusing or inspecting any man- 
uscript from any person whatsoever, and desire that no ap- 
plication on that score may be made to me from this time 
forth ; this resolution, which for most just cause is taken 
and here notified, being, like the laws of the Medes and the 
Persians, not to be changed." 

It was some time after this public announcement that 
a hand, which may have trembled while yet it was very 
brave and resolute, dropped into the little post-office at 
Haworth, in Yorkshire, a packet for Robert Southey. His 
bold truthfulness, his masculine self-control, his strong 
heart, his domestic temper sweet and venerable, his puri- 
ty of manners, a certain sweet austerity, attracted to him 
women of fine sensibility and genius who would fain es- 
cape from their own falterings and temerities under the 
authority of a faithful director. Already Maria del Occi- 
dente, " the most impassioned and most imaginative of all 
poetesses," had poured into his ear the tale of her slighted 
love. Newly come from Paris, and full of enthusiasm for 
the Poles, she hastened to Keswick to see in person her 
sympathetic adviser; she proved, says Southey, a most 
interesting person of the mildest and gentlest manners. 
With him she left, on returning to America, her Zophiel 
in manuscript, the publication of which he superintended. 



128 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

"Zophiel, Southey says, is by some Yankee woman" — - 
Charles Lamb breaks forth — "as if there ever had been 
a woman capable of anything so great!" Now, in 1837, 
a woman of finer spirit, and capable of higher things than 
Zophiel, addressed a letter to Robert Southey, asking his 
judgment of her powers as disclosed in the poems which 
she forwarded. For some weeks Charlotte Bronte waited, 
until almost all hope of a reply was lost. At length the 
verdict came. Charlotte Bronte's verse was assuredly 
written with her left hand ; her passionate impulses, cross- 
ed and checked by fiery fiats of the will, would not mould 
themselves into little stanzas; the little stanzas must be 
correct, therefore they must reject such irregular heavings 
and swift repressions of the heart. Southey's delay in re- 
plying had been caused by absence from home. A little 
personal knowledge of a poet in the decline of life might 
have tempered her enthusiasm ; yet he is neither a disap- 
pointed nor a discontented man ; she will never hear from 
him any chilling sermons on the text, All is vanity ; the 
faculty of verse she possesses in no inconsiderable degree ; 
but this, since the beginning of the century, has grown to 
be no rare possession ; let her beware of making literature 
her profession, check day-dreams, and find her chief happi- 
ness in her womanly duties ; then she may write poetry 
for its own sake, not in a spirit of emulation, not through 
a passion for celebrity ; the less celebrity is aimed at, the 
more it is likely to be deserved. " Mr. Southey's letter," 
said Charlotte Bronte, many years later, " was kind and 
admirable, a little stringent, but it did me good." She 
wrote again, striving to repress a palpitating joy and pride 
in the submission to her director's counsel, and the sacri- 
fice of her cherished hopes ; telling him more of her daily 
life, of her obedience to the day's duty, her efforts to be 



y.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 129 

sensible and sober : " I had not ventured," she says, " to 
hope for such a reply — so considerate in its tone, so noble 
in its spirit." Once more Southey wrote, hoping that she 
would let him see her at the Lakes: "You would then 
think of me afterwards with the more good-will, because 
you would perceive that there is neither severity nor mo- 
roseness in the state of mind to which years and observa- 
tion have brought me. . . . And now, madam, God bless 
you. Farewell, and believe me to be your sincere friend, 
Robert Southey." It was during a visit to the Lakes that 
Charlotte Bronte told her biographer of these letters. But 
Southey lay at rest in Crosthwaite churchyard. 

" My days among the dead are past " — Southey wrote, 
but it is evident that the living, and not those of his own 
household alone, claimed no inconsiderable portion of his 
time. Indeed, it would not be untrue to assert that few 
men have been more genuinely and consistently social, 
that few men ever yielded themselves more constantly to 
the pleasures of companionship. But the society he loved 
best was that of old and chosen friends, or if new friends, 
one at a time, and only one. Next to romping with my 
children, he said, I enjoy a tete-a-tete conversation with an 
old friend or a new. " With one I can talk of familiar 
subjects which we have discussed in former years, and with 
the other, if he have any brains, I open what to me is a 
new mine of thought." Miscellaneous company to a cer- 
tain extent disordered and intoxicated him. He felt no 
temptation to say a great deal, but he would often say 
things strongly and emphatically, which were better left 
unsaid. "In my hearty hatred of assentation I commit 
faults of the opposite kind. Now I am sure to find this 
out myself, and to get out of humour with myself ; what 
prudence I have is not ready on demand ; and so it is that 



130 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

the society of any except my friends, though it may be 
sweet in the mouth, is bitter in the belly." When Cole- 
ridge, in their arguments, allowed him a word, Southey 
made up in weight for what was wanting in measure ; he 
saw one fact quickly, and darted at it like a greyhound. 
De Quincey has described his conversation as less flowing 
and expansive than that of Wordsworth — more apt to 
clothe itself in a keen, sparkling, aphoristic form ; conse- 
quently sooner coming to an abrupt close ; " the style of 
his mind naturally prompts him to adopt a trenchant, pun- 
gent, aculeated form of terse, glittering, stenographic sen- 
tences — sayings which have the air of laying down the law 
without any locus penitentim or privilege of appeal, but are 
not meant to do so." The same manner, tempered and 
chastened by years, can be recognized in the picture of 
Southey drawn by his friend Sir Henry Taylor : — 

" The characteristics of his manner, as of his appearance, 
were lightness and strength, an easy and happy composure 
as the accustomed mood, and much mobility at the same 
time, so that he could be readily excited into any degree of 
animation in discourse, speaking, if the subject moved him 
much, with extraordinary fire and force, though always in 
light, laconic sentences. When so moved, the fingers of his 
right hand often rested against his mouth and quivered 
through nervous susceptibility. But excitable as he was in 
conversation, he was never angry or irritable ; nor can there 
be any greater mistake concerning him than that into which 
some persons have fallen when they have inferred, from the 
fiery vehemence with which he could give utterance to moral 
anger in verse or prose, that he was personally ill-tempered 
or irascible. He was, in truth, a man whom it was hard- 
ly possible to quarrel with or offend personally, and face to 
face He was averse from argumentation, and would com- 
monly quit a subject, ^hen it was passing into that shape, 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 131 

with a quiet and good-humoured indication of the view in 
which he rested. He talked most, and with most interest, 
about books and about public affairs ; less, indeed hardly at 
all, about the characters and qualities of men in private life. 
In the society of strangers or of acquaintances, he seemed to 
take more interest in the subjects spoken of than in the per- 
sons present, his manner being that of natural courtesy and 
general benevolence without distinction of individuals. Had 
there been some tincture of social vanity in him, perhaps he 
would have been brought into closer relations with those 
whom he met in society ; but though invariably kind and 
careful of their feelings, he was indifferent to the manner in 
which they regarded him, or (as the phrase is) to his effect in 
society ; and they might, perhaps, be conscious that the kind- 
ness they received was what flowed naturally and inevitably to 
all, that they had nothing to give in return which was of value 
to him, and that no individual relations were established." 

How deep and rich Southey's social nature was, his pub- 
lished correspondence, some four or five thousand printed 
pages, tells sufficiently. These letters, addressed, for the 
most part, to good old friends, are indeed genial, liberal of 
sympathy, and expecting sympathy in return ; pleasantly 
egotistic, grave, playful, wise, pathetic, with a kind of strin- 
gent pathos showing through checks imposed by the wiser 
and stronger will. Southey did not squander abroad the 
treasures of his affection. To lavish upon casual acquaint- 
ance the outward and visible signs of friendship seemed 
to him a profaning of the mystery of manly love. " Your 
feelings," he writes to Coleridge, " go naked ; I cover mine 
with a bear-skin ; I will not say that you harden yours by 
your mode, but I am sure that mine are the warmer for 
their clothing." With strangers a certain neutral courtesy 
served to protect his inner self like the low leaves of his 
own holly-tree : 



132 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

" Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen 
Wrinkled and keen ; 
No grazing cattle through their prickly round 
Can reach to wound ;" 

but to those of whose goodness and love he was well as- 
sured, there were no protecting spines : 

" Gentle at home amid my friends I'd be, 
Like the high leaves upon the Holly-tree." 

" Old friends and old books," he says, " are the best things 
that this world affords (I like old wine also), and in these 
I am richer than most men (the wine excepted)." In the 
group of Southey's friends, what first strikes one is, not 
that they are men of genius — although the group includes 
Wordsworth, and Scott, and Henry Taylor — but that they 
are good men. No one believed more thoroughly than 
Southey that goodness is a better thing than genius ; yet 
he required in his associates some high excellence, extraor- 
dinary kindness of disposition or strength of moral char- 
acter, if not extraordinary intellect. To knit his friends 
in a circle was his ardent desire; in the strength of his 
affections time and distance made no change. An old 
College friend, Lightfoot, to visit Southey, made the long- 
est journey of his life; it was eight -and -twenty years 
since they had met. When their hands touched, Light- 
foot trembled like an aspen-leaf. " I believe," says South- 
ey, " no men ever met more cordially after so long a sep- 
aration, or enjoyed each other's society more. I shall 
never forget the manner in which he first met me, nor 
the tone in which he said ' that, having now seen me, he 
should return home and die in peace.' " But of all 
friends he was most at ease with his dear Dapple, Gros- 
renor Bedford, who suited for every mood of mirth and 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 133 

sorrow. When Mrs. Southey had fallen into her sad de- 
cay, and the once joyous house was melancholy and silent, 
Southey turned for comfort to Bedford. Still, some of 
their Rabelaisian humour remained, and all their warmth 
of brotherly affection. " My father," says Cuthbert South- 
ey, " was never tired of talking into Mr. Bedford's trum- 
pet." And in more joyous days, what noise and nonsense 
did they not make ! " Oh ! Grosvenor," exclaims South- 
ey, " is it not a pity that two men who love nonsense so 
cordially and naturally and bonafidically as you and I, 
should be three hundred miles asunder ? For my part, I 
insist upon it that there is no sense so good as your hon- 
est, genuine nonsense." 

A goodly company of friends becomes familiar to us as 
we read Southey's correspondence : — Wynn, wherever he 
was, " always doing something else," yet able, in the midst 
of politics and business, to find time to serve an old school- 
fellow; Rickman, full of practical suggestions, and accu- 
rate knowledge and robust benevolence ; John May, unfail- 
ing in kindness and fidelity ; Lamb for play and pathos, 
and subtle criticism glancing amid the puns; William 
Taylor for culture and literary theory, and paradox and 
polysyllables; Landor for generous admiration, and kin- 
dred enthusiasms and kindred prejudices; Elmsley, and 
Lightfoot, and Danvers for love and happy memories; 
Senhora Barker, the Bhow Begum, for frank familiarities, 
and warm, womanly services ; Caroline Bowles for rarer 
sympathy and sacreder hopes and fears; Henry Taylor 
for spiritual sonship, as of a son who is also an equal ; and 
Grosvenor Bedford for everything great and small, glad 
and sad, wise and foolish. 

No literary rivalries or jealousies ever interrupted for a 
moment any friendship of Southey. Political and relig- 



134 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

cms differences, which in strangers were causes of grave 
offence, seemed to melt away when the heretic or erring 
statist was a friend. But if success, fashion, flattery, tested 
a man, and proved him wanting, as seemed to be the case 
with Humphry Davy, his affection grew cold ; and an ha- 
bitual dereliction of social duty, such as that of Coleridge, 
could not but transform Southey's feeling of love to one of 
condemning sorrow. To his great contemporaries, Scott, 
Landor, Wordsworth, his admiration was freely given. 
" Scott," he writes, " is very ill. He suffers dreadfully, 
but bears his sufferings with admirable equanimity. . . . 
God grant that he may recover ! He is a noble and gen- 
erous-hearted creature, whose like we shall not look upon 
again." Of Wordsworth : — "A greater poet than Words- 
worth there never has been, nor ever will be." " Two or 
three generations must pass before the public affect to 
admire such poets as Milton and Wordsworth. Of such 
men the world scarcely produces one in a millennium." 
With indignation crossed by a gleam of humour, he learnt 
that Ebenezer Elliott, his pupil in the art of verse, had 
stepped forward as the lyrist of radicalism ; but the feel- 
ing could not be altogether anger with which he remem- 
bered that earnest face, once seen by him at a Sheffield 
inn, its pale grey eyes full of fire and meaning, its expres- 
sion suiting well with Elliott's frankness of manner and 
simplicity of character. William Taylor was one of the 
liberals of liberal Norwich, and dangled abroad whatever 
happened to be the newest paradox in religion. But nei- 
ther his radicalism, nor his Pyrrhonism, nor his paradoxes, 
could estrange Southey. The last time the oddly-assorted 
pair met was in Taylor's house ; the student of German 
criticism had found some theological novelty, and wished 
to draw his guest into argument ; Southey parried the 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 135 

thrusts good-humouredly, and at last put an end to them 
with the words, "Taylor, come and see me at Keswick. 
We will ascend Skiddaw, where I shall have you nearer 
heaven, and we will then discuss such questions as these." 
In the year 1823 one of his oldest friends made a pub- 
lic attack on Southey, and that friend the gentlest and 
sweetest -natured of them all. In a Quarterly article 
Southey had spoken of the Essays of Elia as a book which 
wanted only a sounder religious feeling to be as delight- 
ful as it was original. He had intended to alter the ex- 
pression in the proof-sheet, but no proof-sheet was ever 
sent. Lamb, already pained by references to his writings 
in the Quarterly, some of which he erroneously ascribed 
to Southey, was deeply wounded. " He might have spared 
an old friend such a construction of a few careless flights 
that meant no harm to religion." A long expostulation 
addressed by Elia to Robert Southey, Esq., appeared in 
the London Magazine for October, only a portion of which 
is retained in the Elia Essays under the title of "The 
Tombs of the Abbey ;" for though Lamb had playfully re- 
sented Coleridge's salutation, " my gentle-hearted Charles," 
his heart was indeed gentle, and could not endure the pain 
of its own wrath; among the memorials of the dead in 
Westminster he finds his right mind, his truer self, once 
more; he forgets the grave aspect with which Southey 
looked awful on his poor friend, and spends his indigna- 
tion harmless as summer lightning over the heads of a 
Dean and Chapter. Southey, seeing the announcement of 
a letter addressed to him by Lamb, had expected a sheaf 
of friendly pleasantries ; with surprise he learnt what pain 
his words had caused. He hastened to explain; had 
Lamb intimated his feelings in private, he would have 
tried, by a passage in the ensuing Quarterly, to efface the 



136 SOUTHEY. [chat 

impression unhappily created ; he ended with a declaration 
of unchanged affection, and a proposal to call on Lamb. 
"On my part," Southey said, "there was not even a mo- 
mentary feeling of anger ;" he at once understood the love, 
the error, the soreness, and the repentance awaiting a be- 
ing so composed of goodness as Elia, " Dear Southey " 
— runs the answer of Lamb — " the kindness of your note 
has melted away the mist that was upon me. I have been 
fighting against a shadow. ... I wish both magazine and 
review were at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed 
to see you, and my sister (though innocent) will be still 
more so, for this folly was done without her knowledge, 
and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel 
was absent at the time. I will make up courage to see 
you, however, any day next week. We shall hope that you 
will bring Edith with you. That will be a second morti- 
fication ; she will hate to see us ; but come and heap em- 
bers ; we deserve it, I for what I have done, and she for 
being my sister. Do come early in the day, by sunlight, 
that you may see my Milton. . . . Your penitent C. Lamb." 
At Bristol, in 1808, Southey met for the first time the 
man of all others whom he most desired to see, the only 
man living, he says, " of whose praise I was ambitious, or 
whose censure would have humbled me." This was Wal- 
ter Savage Landor. Madoc, on which Southey had built 
his hope of renown as a poet, had been published, and had 
been coldly received ; Kehama, which had been begun, 
consequently now stood still. Their author could indeed, 
as he told Sir George Beaumont, be contented with post- 
humous fame, but it was impossible to be contented with 
posthumous bread and cheese. " St. Cecilia herself could 
not have played the organ if there had been nobody to 
blow the bellows for her." At this moment, when he 



y.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 137 

turned sadly and bravely from poetry to more profitable 
work, he first looked on Landor. " I never saw any one 
more unlike myself," he writes, " in every prominent part 
of human character, nor any one who so cordially and in- 
stinctively agreed with me on so many of the most impor- 
tant subjects. I have often said before we met, that I 
would walk forty miles to see him, and having seen him, 
I would gladly walk fourscore to see him again. He talk- 
ed of Tkalaba, and I told him of the series of mythologi- 
cal poems which I had planned, . . . and also told him for 
what reason they had been laid aside ; in plain English, 
that I could not afford to write them. Landor's reply was, 
1 Go on with them, and I will pay for printing them, as 
many as you will write, and as many copies as you 
please.' " The princely offer stung Southey, as he says, 
to the very core; not that he thought of accepting that 
offer, but the generous words were themselves a deed, 
and claimed a return. He rose earlier each morning to 
carry on his Kehama, without abstracting time from bet- 
ter-paid task-work ; it advanced, and duly as each section 
of this poem, and subsequently of his Roderick, came to 
be written, it was transcribed for the friend whose sym- 
pathy and admiration were a golden reward. To be 
praised by one's peers is indeed happiness. Landor, lib- 
eral of applause, was keen in suggestion and exact in cen- 
sure. Both friends were men of ardent feelings, though 
one had tamed himself, while the other never could be 
tamed; both often gave their feelings a vehement utter- 
ance. On many matters they thought, in the main, alike — 
on the grand style in human conduct, on the principles of 
the poetic art, on Spanish affairs, on Catholicism. The 
secret of Landor's high-poised dignity in verse had been 
discovered by Southey ; he, like Landor, aimed at a clas- 
K 7 w 



138 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

sical purity of diction ; he, like Landor, loved, as a shaper 
of imaginative forms, to embody in an act, or an incident, 
the virtue of some eminent moment of human passion, and 
to give it fixity by sculptured phrase ; only the repression 
of a fiery spirit is more apparent in Landor's monumental 
lines than in Southey's. With certain organic resemblances, 
and much community of sentiment, there were large differ- 
ences between the two, so that when they were drawn to- 
gether in sympathy, each felt as if he had annexed a new 
province. Landor rejoiced that the first persons who shared 
his turret at Llanthony were Southey and his wife ; again, 
in 1817, the two friends were together for three days at 
Como, after Southey had endured his prime affliction — the 
death of his son : — 

" Grief had swept over him ; days darkened round ; 
Bellagio, Valintelvi smiled in vain, 
And Monte Rosa from Helvetia far 
Advanced to meet us, wild in majesty 
Above the glittering crests of giant sons 
Station'd around ... in vain too ! all in vain." 

Two years later the warm-hearted friend writes from 
Pistoia, rejoicing in Southey's joy : " Thank God ! Tears 
came into my eyes on seeing that you were blessed with 
a son." To watch the happiness of children was Landor's 
highest delight ; to share in such happiness was Southey's ; 
and Arnold and Cuthbert formed a new bond between 
their fathers. In 1836, when Southey, in his sixty-third 
year, guided his son through the scenes of his boyhood, 
several delightful days were spent at Clifton with Landor. 
I never knew a man of brighter genius or of kinder heart, 
said Southey ; and of Landor in earlier years : — " He does 
more than any of the gods of all my mythologies, for his 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 139 

very words are thunder and lightning — such is the power 
and splendour with which they burst out." Landor re- 
sponded with a majestic enthusiasm about his friend, who 
seemed to him no less noble a man than admirable a 
writer : 

u No firmer breast than thine hath Heaven 
To poet, sage, or hero given : 
No heart more tender, none more just, 
To that He largely placed in trust : 
Therefore shalt thou, whatever date 
Of years be thine, with soul elate 
Rise up before the Eternal throne, 
And hear, in God's own voice, ' Well done 1' " 

That "Well done" greeted Southey many years before 
Landor's imperial head was laid low. In the last letter 
from his friend received by Southey — already the darkness 
was fast closing in — he writes, " If any man living is ar- 
dent for your welfare, I am ; whose few and almost worth- 
less merits your generous heart has always overvalued, and" 
whose infinite and great faults it has been too ready to 
overlook. I will write to you often, now I learn that I 
may do it inoffensively; well remembering that among 
the names you have exalted is Walter Landor." Alas ! to 
reply was now beyond the power of Southey ; still, he held 
Gebir in his hands oftener than any other volume of poe- 
try, and, while thought and feeling lived, fed upon its beau- 
ty. " It is very seldom now," Caroline Southey wrote at 
a later date, " that he ever names any person : but this 
morning, before he left his bed, I heard him repeating 
softly to himself, Landor, ay, Landor" 

" If it be not now, yet it will come : the readiness is all " 
— this was ever present to Southey during the happy days 
of labour and rest in Greta Hall. While he was disposing 



140 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

his books so as to make the comeliest show, and delight- 
ing in their goodly ranks ; while he looked into the radiant 
faces of his children, and loved their innocent brightness, 
he yet knew that the day of detachment was approaching. 
There was nothing in such a thought which stirred South- 
ey to a rebellious mood ; had he not set his seal to the 
bond of life ? How his heart rested in his home, only his 
own words can tell ; even a journey to London seemed too 
long: — "Oh dear; oh dear! there is such a comfort in 
one's old coat and old shoes, one's own chair and own fire- 
side, one's own writing-desk and own library — with a lit- 
tle girl climbing up to my neck, and saying, ' Don't go to 
London, papa — you must stay with Edith ;' and a little boy, 
whom I have taught to speak the language of cats, dogs, 
cuckoos, and jackasses, etc., before he can articulate a word 
of his own ; — there is such a comfort in all these things, 
that transportation to London for four or five weeks seems 
a heavier punishment than any sins of mine deserve." 
Nor did his spirit of boyish merriment abate until over- 
whelming sorrow weighed him down : — " I am quite as noi- 
sy as I ever was," he writes to Lightfoot, " and should 
take as much delight as ever in showering stones through 
the hole of the staircase against your room door, and hear- 
ing with what hearty good earnest c you fool ' was vocifer- 
ated in indignation against me in return. Oh, dear Light- 
foot, what a blessing it is to have a boy's heart ! it is as 
great a blessing in carrying one through this world, as 
to have a child's spirit will be in fitting us for the next." 
But Southey's light - heartedness was rounded by a circle 
of earnest acquiescence in the law of mortal life ; a clear- 
obscure of faith as pure and calm and grave as the heavens 
of a midsummer night. At thirty he writes : — " No man 
was ever more contented with his lot than I am, for few 



v.] WAYS OF LIFE AT KESWICK, 1803—1839. 141 

have ever had more enjoyments, and none had ever better 
or worthier hopes. Life, therefore, is sufficiently dear to 
me, and long life desirable, that I may accomplish all which 
I design. But yet I could be well content that the next 
century were over, and my part fairly at an end, having 
been gone well through. Just as at school one wished the 
school-days over, though we were happy enough there, be- 
cause we expected more happiness and more liberty when 
we were to be our own masters, might lie as much later in 
the morning as we pleased, have no bounds and do no ex- 
ercise — just so do I wish that my exercises were over." 
At thirty-five: — "Almost the only wish I ever give utter- 
ance to is that the next hundred years were over. It is 
not that the uses of this world seem to me weary, stale, 
flat, and unprofitable — God knows far otherwise ! No 
man can be better contented with his lot. My paths are 
paths of pleasantness. . . . Still, the instability of human 
happiness is ever before my eyes ; I long for the certain 
and the permanent." "My notions about life are much 
the same as they are about travelling — there is a good deal 
of amusement on the road, but, after all, one wants to be 
at rest." At forty : — " My disposition is invincibly cheer- 
ful, and this alone would make me a cheerful man if I 
were not so from the tenor of my life ; yet I doubt wheth- 
er the strictest Carthusian has the thought of death more 
habitually in his mind." 

Such was Southey's constant temper : to some persons 
it may seem an unfortunate one ; to some it may be prac- 
tically unintelligible. But those who accept of the feast 
of life freely, who enter with a bounding foot its measures 
of beauty and of joy — glad to feel all the while the ser- 
viceable sackcloth next the skin — will recognize in Southey 
an instructed brother of the Renunciants' rule. 



CHAPTER VI. 

CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803 1843. 

In October, 1805, Southey started with his frieiid Elmsley 
for a short tour in Scotland. On their way northward 
they stopped three days at Ashestiel. There, in a small 
house, rising amid its old-fashioned garden, with pastoral 
hills all around, and the Tweed winding at the meadow's 
end, lived Walter Scott. It was the year in which old 
Border song had waked up, with ampler echoings, in the 
Lay of the Last Minstrel^ and Scott was already famous. 
Earlier in the year he had visited Grasmere, and had stood 
upon the summit of Helvellyn, with Wordsworth and 
Davy by his side. The three October days, with their 
still, misty brightness, went by in full enjoyment. Southey 
had brought with him a manuscript containing sundry 
metrical romances of the fifteenth century, on which his 
host pored, as far as courtesy and the hours allowed, with 
much delight ; and the guests saw Melrose, that old ro- 
mance in stone so dear to Scott, went salmon-spearing on 
the Tweed, dined on a hare snapped up before their eyes 
by Percy and Douglas, and visited Yarrow. From Ashes- 
tiel they proceeded to Edinburgh. Southey looked coldly 
on the grey metropolis ; its new city seemed a kind of 
Puritan Bath, which worshipped propriety instead of pleas- 
ure ; but the old town, seen amid the slant light of a wild, 



chap, vi.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 143 

red sunset, impressed him much, its vast irregular outline 
of roofs and chimneys rising against tumultuous clouds 
like the dismantled fragments of a giant's palace. South- 
ey was prepared to find himself and his friends of the 
Lakes persons of higher stature than the Scotch literatuli. 
Before accepting an invitation to meet him at supper, 
Jeffrey politely forwarded the proof of an unpublished re- 
view of Madoc; if the poet preferred that his reviewer 
should not present himself, Mr. Jeffrey would deny him- 
self the pleasure of Mr. Southey's acquaintance. Southey 
was not to be daunted, and, as he tells it himself, felt noth- 
ing but good-humour on beholding a bright-faced homun- 
culus of five-foot-one, the centre of an attentive circle, 
eenunciating with North-British eelocution his doctrines 
on taste. The lively little gentleman, who thought to 
crush The Excursion — he could as easily crush Skiddaw, 
said Southey — received from the author of Madoc a cour- 
tesy de haut en bas intended to bring home to his con- 
sciousness the fact that he was — but five-foot-one. The 
bland lips of the gods who looked down on Auld Reekie 
that evening smiled at the magnanimity alike of poet and 
critic. 

Two years later (1807), differences having arisen between 
the proprietors and the editor of the Edinburgh Review, 
it was in contemplation to alter the management, and Long- 
man wrote requesting Southey to review him two or three 
articles "in his best manner." Southey did not keep 
firkins of criticism of first and second brand, but he was 
not unwilling to receive ten guineas a sheet instead of 
seven pounds. When, however, six months later, Scott 
urged his friend to contribute, Judge Jeffrey still sat on 
the bench of the Edinburgh Review, hanging, drawing, and 
quartering luckless poets with undiminished vivacity. It 



UA SOUTHEY. [chap. 

was of no use for Scott to assure Southey that the homun- 
culus, notwithstanding his flippant attacks on Madoc and 
Thalaba, had the most sincere respect for their author and 
his talents. Setting all personal feelings aside, an irrecon- 
cilable difference, Southey declared, between Jeffrey and 
himself upon every great principle of taste, morality, and 
policy, occasioned a difficulty which could not be removed. 
Within less than twelve months Scott, alienated by the 
deepening Whiggery of the Review, and by more personal 
causes, had ceased to contribute, anpl opposite his name in 
the list of subscribers Constable had written, with indig- 
nant notes of exclamation, " Stopt ! ! /" John Murray, the 
young bookseller in Fleet Street, had been to Ashestiel ; 
in " dern privacie " a bold complot was laid ; why should 
the Edinburgh clique carry it before them? The spirit 
of England was still sound, and would respond to loyalty, 
patriotism, the good traditions of Church and State, the 
temper of gentlemen, courage, scholarship ; Gifford, of the 
Anti - Jacobin, had surely a sturdier arm than Jeffrey; 
George Ellis would remember his swashing-blow ; there 
were the Roses, and Matthias, and Heber ; a rival Review 
should see the light, and that speedily ; " a good plot, good 
friends, and full of expectation — an excellent plot, very 
good friends." 

Southey was invited to write on Spanish affairs for the 
first number of the Quarterly (February, 1809). His polit- 
ical opinions had undergone a considerable alteration since 
the days of Pantisocracy and Joan of Arc. The Reign of 
Terror had not caused a violent reaction against the doc- 
trine of a Republic, nor did he soon cease to sympathize 
with France. But his hopes were dashed; it was plain 
that "the millennium would not come this bout." Man 
as he is appeared more greedy, ignorant, and dangerous 



vi.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 145 

than he had appeared before, though man as he may be 
was still a being composed of knowledge, virtue, and love. 
The ideal republic receded into the dimness of unborn 
time; no doubt — so Southey maintained to the end — a 
republic is the best form of government in itself, as a sun- 
dial is simpler and surer than a time-piece ; but the sun 
of reason does not always shine, and therefore complicated 
systems of government, containing checks and counter- 
checks, are needful in old countries for the present ; bet- 
ter systems are no doubt conceivable — for better men. 
"Mr. Southey's mind," wrote Hazlitt, "is essentially san- 
guine, even to overweeningness. It is prophetic of good ; 
it cordially embraces it ; it casts a longing, lingering look 
after it, even when it is gone for ever. He cannot bear 
to give up the thought of happiness, his confidence in his 
fellow-men, when all else despair. It is the very element 
1 where he must live or have no life at all.' " This is true ; 
we sacrifice too much to prudence — Southey said, when 
not far from sixty — and in fear of incurring the danger 
or the reproach of enthusiasm, too often we stifle the ho- 
liest impulses of the understanding and the heart. Still, 
at sixty he believed in a state of society actually to be 
realized as superior to English society in the nineteenth 
century, as that itself is superior to the condition of the 
tattooed Britons, or of the Northern Pirates from whom 
we have descended. But the error of supposing such a 
state of society too near, of fancying that there is a short 
road to it, seemed to him a pernicious error, seducing the 
young and generous into an alliance with whatever is fla- 
gitious and detestable. 

It was not until the Peace of Amiens (1802) that 
Southey was restored in feeling to his own country. 
From that hour the new departure in his politics may be 
1* 



146 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

said to date. The honour of England became as dear to 
him as to her most patriotic son; and in the man who 
had subjugated the Swiss Republic, and thrown into a 
dungeon the champion of Negro independence, and 
slaughtered his prisoners at Jaffa, he indignantly refused 
to recognize the representative of the generous principles 
of 1789. To him, as to Wordsworth, the very life of 
virtue in mankind seemed to dwell in the struggle against 
the military despotism which threatened to overwhelm the 
whole civilized world. Whatever went along with a spir- 
ited war-policy Southey could accept. It appeared to him- 
self that his views and hopes had changed precisely be- 
cause the heart and soul of his wishes had continued the 
same. To remove the obstacles which retard the improve- 
ment of mankind was the one object to which, first and 
last, he gave his most earnest vows. " This has been the 
pole-star of my course ; the needle has shifted according 
to the movements of the state vessel wherein I am em- 
barked, but the direction to which it points has always 
been the same. I did not fall into the error of those 
who, having been the friends of France when they imag- 
ined that the cause of liberty was implicated in her suc- 
cess, transferred their attachment from the Republic to 
the Military Tyranny in which it ended, and regarded 
with complacency the progress of oppression because 
France was the oppressor. ' They had turned their faces 
toward the East in the morning to worship the rising sun, 
and in the evening they were looking eastward, obstinately 
affirming that still the sun was there.' I, on the contrary, 
altered my position as the world went round." 1 

Wordsworth has described in memorable words the 
sudden exaltation of the spirit of resistance to Napoleon, 

1 The words quoted by Southey are his own, written in 1809. 



vi.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 147 

its change from the temper of fortitude to enthusiasm, 
animated by hope, when the Spanish people rose against 
their oppressors. " From that moment," he says, " this 
corruptible put on incorruption, and this mortal put on 
immortality." Southey had learned to love the people 
of the Peninsula; he had almost naturalized himself 
among them by his studies of Spanish and Portuguese 
history and literature. Now there was in him a new birth 
of passion at a period of life when ordinarily the crust of 
custom begins to encase our free spirits. All his moral 
ardour flowed in the same current with his political enthu- 
siasm ; in this war there was as direct a contest between 
the principles of evil and good as the elder Persians or 
the Manicheans imagined in their fables. "Since the 
stirring day of the French Revolution," he writes to John 
May, " I have never felt half so much excitement in po- 
litical events as the present state of Spain has given me." 
Little as he liked £o leave home, if the Spaniards would 
bury their crown and sceptre, he would gird up his loins 
and assist at the ceremony, devout as ever pilgrim at Com- 
postella. A federal republic which should unite the Pen- 
insula, and allow the internal governments to remain dis- 
tinct, was what Southey ardently desired. When news 
came of the Convention of Cintra (1808), the poet, ordi- 
narily so punctual a sleeper, lay awake all night; since 
the execution of the Brissotines no public event distressed 
him so deeply. " How gravely and earnestly used Samuel 
Taylor Coleridge " — so writes Coleridge's daughter — " and 
William Wordsworth and my uncle Southey also, to dis- 
cuss the affairs of the nation, as if it all came home to 
their business and bosoms, as if it were their private con- 
cern ! Men do not canvass these matters now - a - days, I 
think, quite in the same tone." 



148 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

That faith in the ultimate triumph of good which sus- 
tains Southey' s heroine against the persecution of the Al- 
mighty Rajah, sustained South ey himself during the long 
struggle with Napoleon. A military despotism youthful 
and full of vigour, he said, must beat down corrupt estab- 
lishments and worn-out governments ; but how can it beat 
down for ever a true love of liberty and a true spirit of 
patriotism ? When at last tidings reached Keswick that 
the Allies were in Paris, Southey's feelings were such as 
he had never experienced before. " The curtain had fallen 
after a tragedy of flve-and-twenty years." The hopes, and 
the ardours, and the errors, and the struggles of his early 
life crowded upon his mind; all things seemed to have 
worked together for good. He rejoiced that the whirl- 
wind of revolution had cleared away the pestilence of the 
old governments; he rejoiced that right had conquered 
might. He did not wish to see the bad Bourbon race 
restored, except to complete Bonaparte's overthrow. And 
he feared lest an evil peace should be made. Paris taken, 
a commanding intellect might have cast Europe into what- 
ever mould it pleased. " The first business," says Southey, 
with remarkable prevision, " should have been to have re- 
duced France to what she was before Louis XIV.'s time ; 
the second, to have created a great power in the North of 
Germany, with Prussia at its head ; the third, to have con- 
solidated Italy into one kingdom or commonwealth." 

The politicians of the Edinburgh Review had predicted 
ruin for all who dared to oppose the Corsican ; they ridi- 
culed the romantic hopes of the English nation; the fate 
of Spain, they declared in 1810, was decided; it would be 
cruel, they said, to foment petty insurrections ; France had 
conquered Europe. It was this policy of despair which 
roused Scott and Southey. "We shall hoist the bloody 



vl] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 149 

flag," writes the latter, " down alongside that Scotch ship, 
and engage her yard-arm to yard-arm." But at first 
Southey, by his own request, was put upon other work 
than that of firing off the heavy Quarterly guns. Proba- 
bly no man in England had read so many books of travel ; 
these he could review better, he believed, than anything 
else; biography and history were also within his reach; 
with English poetry, from Spenser onwards, his acquaint- 
ance was wide and minute, but he took no pleasure in sit- 
ting in judgment on his contemporaries ; his knowledge of 
the literary history of Spain and Portugal was a speciality, 
which, as often as the readers of the Review could bear 
with it, might be brought into use. Two things he could 
promise without fail — perfect sincerity in what he might 
write, without the slightest pretension of knowledge which 
he did not possess, and a punctuality not to be exceeded by 
Mr. Murray's opposite neighbour, the clock of St. Dunstan's. 
Southey's essays — literary, biographical, historical, and 
miscellaneous — would probably now exist in a collected 
form, and constitute a storehouse of information — infor- 
mation often obtained with difficulty, and always conveyed 
in a lucid and happy style — were it not that he chose, on 
the eve of the Reform Bill, to earn whatever unpopulari- 
ty he could by collecting his essays on political and social 
subjects. Affairs had hurried forward with eager strides ; 
these Quarterly articles seemed already far behind, and 
might safely be left to take a quiet corner in Time's wal- 
let among the alms for oblivion. Yet Southey's political 
articles had been effective in their day, and have still a 
value by no means wholly antiquarian. His home politics 
had been, in the main, determined by his convictions on 
the great European questions. There was a party of 
revolution in this countrv eager to break with the past, 



150 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

ready to venture every experiment for a future of mere 
surmise. Southey believed that the moral sense of the 
English people, their regard for conduct, would do much 
to preserve them from lawless excess ; still, the lesson read 
by recent history was that order once overthrown, anarchy 
follows, to be itself quelled by the lordship of the sword. 
Rights, however, were pleaded — shall we refuse to any man 
the rights of a man ? " Therapeutics," says Southey, " were 
in a miserable state as long as practitioners proceeded 
upon the gratuitous theory of elementary complexions; . . . 
natural philosophy was no better, being a mere farrago of 
romance, founded upon idle tales or fanciful conjectures, 
not upon observation and experiment. The science of 
politics is just now in the same stage ; it has been erect- 
ed by shallow sophists upon abstract rights and imaginary 
compacts, without the slightest reference to habits and 
history." " Order and improvement " were the words in- 
scribed on Southey's banner. Order, that England might 
not fall, as France had fallen, into the hands of a military 
saviour of society ; order, that she might be in a condition 
to wage her great feud on behalf of freedom with undi- 
vided energy. Order, therefore, first ; not by repression 
alone — though there were a time and a place for repres- 
sion also — but order with improvement as a portion of 
its very life and being. Southey was a poet and a moral- 
ist, and judged of the well-being of a people by other than 
material standards; the wealth of nations seemed to him 
something other and higher than can be ascertained by 
wages and prices, rent and revenue, exports and imports. 
" True it is," he writes, " the ground is more highly culti- 
vated, the crooked hedge-rows have been thrown down, 
the fields are in better shape and of handsomer dimen- 
sions, the plough makes longer furrows, there is more corn 



yi.1 CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 151 

and fewer weeds ; but look at the noblest produce of the 
earth — look at the children of the soil, look at the seeds 
which are sown here for immortality!" "The system 
which produces the happiest moral effects will be found 
the most beneficial to the interest of the individual and 
the general weal ; upon this basis the science of political 
economy will rest at last, when the ponderous volumes 
with which it has been overlaid shall have sunk by their 
own weight into the dead sea of oblivion." Looking 
about him, he asked, What do the English people chiefly 
need? More wealth? It may be so; but rather wisdom 
to use the wealth they have. More votes ? Yes, hereaf- 
ter ; but first the light of knowledge, that men may see 
how to use a vote. Even the visible beauty and grace of 
life seemed to Southey a precious thing, the loss of which 
might be set over against some gain in pounds, shillings, 
and pence. The bleak walls and barrack-like windows of 
a manufactory, the long, unlovely row of operatives' dwell- 
ings, struck a chill into his heart. He contrasts the old 
cottages substantially built of native stone, mellowed by 
time, taken by nature to herself with a mother's fondness, 
the rose-bushes beside the door, the little patch of flower- 
garden — he contrasts these with the bald deformities in 
which the hands of a great mill are stalled. 

Before all else, national education appeared to Southey 
to be the need of England. He saw a great population 
growing up with eager appetites, and consciousness of 
augmented power. Whence were moral thoughtfulness 
and self-restraint to come ? Not, surely, from the triumph 
of liberal opinions; not from the power to read every 
incentive to vice and sedition ; nor from Religious Tract 
Societies ; nor from the portentous bibliolatry of the 
Evangelical party. But there is an education which at 



152 SOUTHEY. |"chap. 

once enlightens the understanding and trains the con- 
science and the will. And there is that great association 
for making men good — the Church of England. Connect 
the two — education and the Church; the progress of en- 
lightenment, virtue, and piety, however gradual, will be sure. 
Subordinate to this primary measure of reform, national 
education, many other measures were advocated by South- 
ey. He looked forward to a time when, the great struggle 
respecting property over — for this struggle he saw loom- 
ing not far off — public opinion will no more tolerate the 
extreme of poverty in a large class of the people than it 
now tolerates slavery in Europe; when the aggregation 
of land in the hands of great owners must cease, when 
that community of lands, which Owen of Lanark would 
too soon anticipate, might actually be realized. But these 
things were, perhaps, far off. Meanwhile how to bring 
nearer the golden age? Southey's son has made out a 
long list of the measures urged upon the English people 
in the Quarterly Review, or elsewhere, by his father. 
Bearing in mind that the proposer of these measures re- 
sisted the Reform Bill, Free Trade, and Catholic Emanci- 
pation, any one curious in such things may determine with 
what political label he should be designated: — National 
education ; the diffusion of cheap and good literature ; a 
well-organized system of colonization, and especially of fe- 
male emigration j 1 a wholesome training for the children 
of misery and vice in great cities; the establishment of 
Protestant sisters of charity, and a better order of hospital 

1 " With the Cape and New Holland I would proceed thus : — ' Gov- 
ern yourselves, and we will protect you as long as you need protec- 
tion ; when that is no longer necessary, remember that though we 
be different countries, each independent, we are one people.' " — R. S. 
to W. S. Landor. Letters, vol. ii. p. 263. 



ti.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 153 

nurses; the establishment of savings-banks in all small 
towns; the abolition of flogging in the army and navy, 
except in extreme cases ; improvements in the poor-laws ; 
alterations in the game-laws; alterations in the criminal 
laws, as inflicting the punishment of death in far too many 
cases; execution of criminals within prison walls; altera- 
tions in the factory system for the benefit of the operative, 
and especially as to the employment of children ; national 
works — reproductive if possible — to be undertaken in 
times of peculiar distress; the necessity of doing away 
with interments in crowded cities ; the system of giving 
allotments of ground to labourers; the employment of 
paupers in cultivating waste lands; the commutation of 
tithes; and last, the need for more clergymen, more col- 
leges, more courts of law. 

"Mr. Southey," said Hazlitt, "missed his way in Uto- 
pia ; he has found it at old Sarum." To one of Southey's 
temper old Sarum seemed good, with its ordered freedom, 
its serious aspiration, its habitual pieties, its reasonable 
service, its reverent history, its beauty of holiness, its close 
where priests who are husbands and fathers live out their 
calm, benignant lives — its amiable home for those whose 
toil is ended, and who now sleep well. But how Southey 
found his way from his early deism to Anglican ortho- 
doxy cannot be precisely determined. Certainly not for 
many years could he have made that subscription to the 
Articles of the Church of England, which at the first bar- 
red his way to taking orders. The superstition, which 
seemed to be the chief spiritual food of Spain, had left 
Southey, for the rest of his life, a resolute opponent of 
Catholicism ; and as he read lives of the Saints and his- 
tories of the Orders, the exclamation, " I do well to be an- 
gry," was often on his lips. For the wisdom, learning, 
L 1 



164 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

and devotion of the Jesuits he had, however, a just respect. 
Geneva, with its grim logic and stark spirituality, suited 
nerves of a different temper from his. For a time South- 
ey thought himself half a Quaker, but he desired more 
visible beauty and more historical charm than he could 
find in Quakerism. Needing a comely home for his spir- 
itual affections, he found precisely what pleased him built 
in the pleasant Anglican close. With growing loyalty to 
the State, his loyalty to the Church could not but keep 
pace. He loved her tolerance, her culture ; he fed upon 
her judicious and learned writers — Taylor, with his bright 
fancies like the little rings of the vine; South, hitting 
out straight from the shoulder at anarchy, fanaticism, and 
licentiousness, as Southey himself would have liked to 
hit; Jackson, whose weight of character made his pages 
precious as with golden bullion. After all, old Sarum had 
some advantages over Utopia. 

The English Constitution consisting of Church and 
State, it seemed to Southey an absurdity in politics to 
give those persons power in the State whose duty it is to 
subvert the Church. Admit Catholics, he said, to every of- 
fice of trust, emolument, or honour ; only never admit them 
into Parliament. " The arguments about equal rights are 
fit only for a schoolboy's declamation ; it may as well be 
said that the Jew has a right to be a bishop, or the Quak- 
er an admiral, as that the Roman Catholic has a right to 
a seat in the British Legislature ; his opinions disqualify 
him." To call this a question of toleration was impu- 
dence; Catholics were free to practise the rites of their 
religion ; they had the full and free use of the press ; per- 
fect toleration was granted to the members of that church, 
which, wherever dominant, tolerates no other. Catholic 
Emancipation would not conciliate Ireland; the great 



n.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 155 

source of Irish misery had been, not England's power, but 
her weakness, and those violences to which weakness re- 
sorts in self-defence; old sores were not to be healed by 
the admission of Catholic demagogues into Parliament. 
The measure styled Emancipation would assuredly be fol- 
lowed by the downfall of the Protestant Establishment in 
Ireland, and by the spread of Catholicism in English soci- 
ety. To Pyrrhonists one form of faith might seem as 
good or as bad as the other; but the great mass of the 
English people had not advanced so far in the march of 
intellect as to perceive no important difference between 
Catholic and Protestant doctrine, or between Catholic and 
Protestant morality. By every possible means, better the 
condition of the Irish peasantry ; give them employment 
in public works ; facilitate, for those who desire it, the 
means of emigration; extend the poor-laws to Ireland, 
and lay that impost on absentees in such a proportion as 
may compensate, in some degree, for their non-residence ; 
educate the people; execute justice and maintain peace, 
and the cry of Catholic Emancipation may be safely disre- 
garded. 

So Southey pleaded in the Quarterly Review. With 
reference to Emancipation and to the Reform Bill, he and 
Wordsworth — who, perhaps, had not kept themselves suf- 
ficiently in relation with living men and the public senti- 
ment of the day — were in their solitude gifted with a meas- 
ure of the prophetic spirit, which in some degree explains 
their alarms. For the prophet who knows little of expe- 
diency and nothing of the manipulation of parties, noth- 
ing of the tangled skein of contending interests, sees the 
future in its moral causes, and he sees it in a vision. But 
he cannot date the appearances in his vision. Battle, and 
garments rolled in blood, and trouble, and dimness of an- 



156 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

guish pass before him, and he proclaims what it is given 
him to see. It matters not a little, however, in the actnal 
event, whether the battle be on the morrow or half a cen- 
tury hence; and the prophet furnishes us with no chro- 
nology, or at best with some vague time and times and 
half a time. New forces have arisen before the terrors of 
his prediction come to pass, and therefore, when they come 
to pass, their effect is often altogether different from that 
anticipated. Wordsworth and Southey were right in de- 
claring that a vast and formidable change was taking place 
in the England of their day: many things which they, 
amid incredulous scoffs, announced, have become actual ; 
others remain to be fulfilled. But the events have taken 
up their place in an order of things foreign to the concep- 
tions of the prophets ; the fire from heaven descends, but 
meanwhile we, ingenious sons of men, have set up a light- 
ning-conductor. 

Southey and the Quarterly Review were often spoken 
of as a single entity. But the Review ^ in truth, never pre- 
cisely represented his feelings and convictions. With Gif- 
ford he had no literary sympathies. Gifford's heart was 
full of kindness, says Southey, for all living creatures ex- 
cept authors ; them he regarded as Isaac Walton did the 
worm. Against the indulgence of that temper Southey 
always protested ; yet he was chosen to bear the reproach 
of having tortured Keats, and of having anonymously glo- 
rified himself at the expense of Shelley. Gifford's omis- 
sions, additions, substitutions, often caused Southey's arti- 
cle in the Review to be very unlike the article which he 
had despatched to the editor in manuscript. Probably 
these changes were often made on warrantable grounds. 
Southey's confidence in his own opinions, which always 
seemed to him to be based upon moral principles, was 



vi.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 15*7 

high ; and he was not in the habit of diluting his ink. 
Phrases which sounded well in the library of Greta Hall 
had quite another sound in Mr. Murray's office in Fleet 
Street. 

On arriving in London for a short visit in the autumn 
of 1813, Southey learnt that the Prince Regent wished to 
confer on him the Laureateship, vacant by the death of 
Pye. Without consulting the Regent, Lord Liverpool had 
previously directed that the office should be offered to 
Walter Scott. On the moment came a letter from Scott 
informing Southey that he had declined the appointment, 
not from any foolish prejudice against holding it, but be- 
cause he was already provided for, and would not engross 
emoluments which ought to be awarded to a man of let- 
ters who had no other views in life. Southey hesitated, 
having ceased for several years to produce occasional verses ; 
but his friend Croker assured him that he would not be 
compelled to write odes as boys write exercises at stated 
times on stated subjects ; that it would suffice if he wrote 
on great public events, or did not write, as the spirit moved 
him ; and thus his scruples were overcome. In a little, low, 
dark room in the purlieus of St. James' — a solitary clerk 
being witness — the oath was duly administered by a fat 
old gentleman-usher in full buckle, Robert Southey swear- 
ing to be a faithful servant to the King, to reveal all trea- 
sons which might come to his knowledge, and to obey the 
Lord Chamberlain in all matters of the King's service. It 
was Scott's belief that his generosity had provided for his 
poorer brother bard an income of three or four hundred 
pounds a year. In reality the emolument was smaller 
and the task-work more irksome than had been supposed. 
The tierce of Canary, swilled by Ben Jonson and his po- 
etic sons, had been wickedly commuted for a small sum ; 



158 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

the whole net income amounted to 901. But this, " the 
very least of Providence's mercies," as a poor clergyman 
said when pronouncing grace over a herring, secured an 
important happiness for Southey : he did not employ it, 
as Byron puts it, to butter his bread on both sides ; he 
added twelve pounds to it, and vested it forthwith in an 
insurance upon his own life. " I have never felt any pain- 
ful anxiety about providing for my family, . . ." he writes 
to Scott ; " but it is with the deepest feeling of thanksgiv- 
ing that I have secured this legacy for my wife and chil- 
dren, and it is to you that I am primarily and chiefly 
indebted." 

Croker's assurance was too hastily given. The birthday 
Ode, indeed, fell into abeyance during the long malady of 
George III. ; but the New- Year's Ode had still to be pro- 
vided. Southey was fortunate in 1814; events worthy 
of celebration had taken place ; a dithyramb, or rather an 
oration in lines of irregular length, was accordingly pro- 
duced, and was forwarded to his musical yoke-fellow, Sir 
William Parsons. But the sight of Southey's page, over 
which the longs and shorts meandered seemingly at their 
own sweet will, shocked the orderly mind of the chief 
musician. What kind of ear could Mr. Southey have ? 
His predecessor, the lamented Mr. Pye, had written his 
Odes always in regular stanzas. What kind of action 
was this exhibited by the unbroken State Pegasus ? Duly 
as each New Year approached, Southey set himself to what 
he called his odeous job ; it was the price he paid for the 
future comfort of his children. While his political assail- 
ants pictured the author of Joan of Arc as a court-lacquey 
following in the train of the fat Adonis, he, with grim 
cheerfulness, was earning a provision for his girls; and had 
it not been a duty to kiss hands on the appointment, His 



vi.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 159 

Royal Highness the Prince Regent would never have seen 
his poet. Gradually the New -Year's Ode ceased to be 
looked for, and Southey was emancipated. His verse- 
making as laureate occasionally rose into something high- 
er than journeyman work ; when public events stirred his 
heart to joy, or grief, or indignation, he wrote many ad- 
mirable periods of measured rhetoric. The Funeral Song 
for the Princess Charlotte is of a higher strain ; a knell, 
heavy yet clear-toned, is tolled by its finely wrought octo- 
syllabics. 

A few months after the battle of Waterloo, which had 
so deeply moved Southey, he started with his wife, a rare 
voyager from Keswick, and his little daughter Edith May, 
on a pilgrimage to the scene of victory. The aunts re- 
mained to take care of Bertha, Kate, and Isabel, with the 
Tf>ine-years-old darling of all, the only boy, Herbert. With 
Bruges, " like a city of Elizabeth's age — you expect to see 
a head with a ruff looking from the window," Southey was 
beyond measure delighted. At Ghent he ransacked book- 
shops, and was pleased to see in the Beguinage the realiza- 
tion of his own and Rickman's ideas on Sisterhoods. On a 
clear September day the travellers visited the battlefield; 
the autumnal sunshine with soft airs, and now and again a 
falling leaf, while the bees were busy with the year's last 
flowers, suited well with the poet's mood of thankfulness, 
tempered by solemn thought. When, early in December, 
they returned with a lading of toys to their beloved lake- 
country, little Edith had hardly recovered from an illness 
which had attacked her at Aix. It was seven o'clock in the 
evening by the time they reached Rydal, and to press for- 
ward and arrive while the children were asleep would be to 
defraud everyone of the first reward earned by so long ab- 
sence. " A return home under fortunate circumstances has 



160 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

something of the character of a triumph, and requires day- 
light." The glorious presence of Skiddaw, and Derwent 
bright under the winter sky, asked also for a greeting at 
noon rather than at night. A depth of grave and tender 
thankfulness lay below Southey's joy that morning ; it was 
twelve years since he had pitched his tent here beside the 
Greta ; twelve years had made him feel the touch of time ; 
but what blessings they had brought ! all his heart's desire 
was here — books, children, leisure, and a peace that pass- 
eth understanding. The instant hour, however, was not for 
meditation but for triumph : — 

" O joyful hour, when to our longing home 

The long-expected wheels at length drew nigh ! 
When the first sound went forth, 'they come ! they come." 

And hope's impatience quicken'd every eye ! 
1 Never had man whom Heaven would heap with bliss 
More glad return, more happy hour than this.' 

" Aloft on yonder bench, with arms dispread, 

My boy stood, shouting there his father's name, 

Waving his hat around his happy head ; 

And there a younger group his sisters came : 

Smiling they stood with looks of pleased surprise 

While tears of joy were seen in elder eyes. 

u Soon all and each came crowding round to share 

The cordial greeting, the beloved sight ; 
What welcomings of hand and lip were there ! 

And when those overflowings of delight 
Subsided to a sense of quiet bliss, 
Life hath no purer, deeper happiness. 

" The young companion of our weary way 
Found here the end desired of all her ills ; 
She who in sickness pining many a day 
Hunger'd and thirsted for her native hills, 



W.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 161 

Forgetful now of suffering past and pain, 
Rejoiced to see her own dear home again. 

" Recovered now the homesick mountaineer 
Sate by the playmate of her infancy, 
The twin-like comrade, 1 — render'd doubly dear 

For that long absence ; full of life was she 
With voluble discourse and eager mien 
Telling of all the wonders she had seen. 

11 Here silently between her parents stood 
My dark-eyed Bertha, timid as a dove ; 

And gently oft from time to time she woo'd 
Pressure of hand, or word, or look of love, 

With impulse shy of bashful tenderness, 

Soliciting again the wished caress. 

" The younger twain in wonder lost were they, 
My gentle Kate and my sweet Isabel : 
Long of our promised coming, day by day, 

It had been their delight to hear and tell ; 
And now when that long-promised hour was come, 
Surprise and wakening memory held them dumb. 



" Soon they grew blithe as they were wont to be ; 

Her old endearments each began to seek ; 
And Isabel drew near to climb my knee, 

And pat with fondling hand her father's cheek ; 
With voice and touch and look reviving thus 
The feelings which had slept in long disuse. 

" But there stood one whose heart could entertain 
And comprehend the fulness of the joy; 
The father, teacher, playmate, was again 
Come to his only and his studious boy ; 

1 Sara Coleridge. 



162 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

And he beheld again that mother's eye 

Which with such ceaseless care had watched his infancy. 

" Bring forth the treasures now — a proud display — 

For rich as Eastern merchants we return ! 
Behold the black Beguine, the Sister grey, 

The Friars whose heads with sober motion turn, 
The Ark well filled with all its numerous hives, 
Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japhet, and their wives. 

"The tumbler loose of limb; the wrestlers twain; 
And many a toy beside of quaint device, 
Which, when his fleecy flocks no more can gain 
Their pasture on the mountains hoar with ice, 
The German shepherd carves with curious knife, 
Earning in easy toil the food of frugal life. 

"It was a group which Richter,had he viewed, 
Might have deemed worthy of his perfect skill ; 

The keen impatience of the younger brood, 
Their eager eyes and fingers never still ; 

The hope, the wonder, and the restless joy 

Of those glad girls and that vociferous boy. 

" The aged friend 1 serene with quiet smile, 

Who in their pleasure finds her own delight ; 

The mother's heart-felt happiness the while ; 
The aunt's rejoicing in the joyful sight; 

And he who in his gaiety of heart, 

With glib and noisy tongue performed the showman's part." 

It was manifest to a thoughtful observer, says De Quin- 
cey, that Southey's golden equanimity was bound up in a 
trinity of chords, a threefold chain — in a conscience clear 
of offence, in the recurring enjoyments from his honoura- 
ble industry, and in the gratification of his parental afiEec- 

1 Mrs. Wilson — then aged seventy-two. 



vi.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 163 

tions. In the light of Herbert's smiles his father almost 
lived ; the very pulses of his heart played in unison with 
the sound of his son's laughter. " There was," De Quincey 
goes on, " in his manner towards this child, and towards 
this only, something that marked an excess of delirious 
doating, perfectly unlike the ordinary chastened movement 
of Southey's affections ; and something also which indi- 
cated a vague fear about him ; a premature unhappiness, 
as if already the inaudible tread of calamity could be di- 
vined, as if already he had lost him." As a baby, while 
Edith was only " like an old book, ugly and good," Her- 
bert, in spite of his Tartar eyes, a characteristic of Southey 
babyhood, was already beautiful. At six he was more gen- 
tle and more loving, says Southey, than you can almost 
conceive. " He has just learnt his Greek alphabet, and is 
so desirous of learning, so attentive and so quick of appre- 
hension, that, if it please God he should live, there is lit- 
tle doubt but that something will come out of him." In 
April, 1809, Southey writes to Landor, twenty-four hours 
after an attack of croup which seized his boy had been 
subdued : " Even now I am far, very far, from being at 
ease. There is a love which passeth the love of women, 
and which is more lightly alarmed than the lightest jeal- 
ousy. Landor, I am not a Stoic at home; I feel as you 
do about the fall of an old tree ! but, O Christ ! what a 
pang it is to look upon the young shoot and think it will 
be cut down ! And this is the thought which almost at all 
times haunts me; it comes upon me in moments when I 
know not whether the tears that start are of love or of 
bitterness." 

The alarm of 1809 passed away, and Herbert grew to 
the age of nine, active and bright of spirit, yet too pale, 
and, like his father, hanging too constantly over his books ; 



164 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

a finely organized being, delicate in his sensibilities, and 
prematurely accomplished. Before the snow had melted 
which shone on Skiddaw that day when the children wel- 
comed home their parents, Herbert Southey lay in his 
grave. His disease was an affection of the heart, and for 
weeks his father, palsied by apprehension, and unable to 
put hand to his regular work, stood by the bedside, with 
composed countenance, with words of hope, and agonized 
heart. Each day of trial made his boy more dear. With 
a trembling pride Southey saw the sufferer's behaviour, 
beautiful in this illness as in all his life ; nothing could 
be more calm, more patient, more collected, more dutiful, 
more admirable. At last, worn with watching, Southey 
and his wife were prevailed upon to lie down. The good 
Mary Barker watched, and it is she who writes the follow- 
ing lines: — "Herbert! — that sweetest and most perfect 
of all children on this earth, who died in my arms at nine 
years of age, whose death I announced to his father and 
mother in their bed, where I had prayed and persuaded 
them to go. When Southey could speak, his first words 
were, ' The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away. 
Blessed be the name of the Lord /' Never can I forget that 
moment" (1816). 

"I am perfectly resigned," Southey wrote to Bedford 
on the most mournful of all days, "and do not give way 
to grief. Thank God I can control myself for the sake of 
others." But next morning found him weak as a child, 
even weaker in body than in mind, for long anxiety had 
worn him to the bone, and while he tried to calm and con- 
sole the rest, his limbs trembled under him. His first wild 
wish to fly from Keswick passed away ; it was good to be 
there near the boy's grave. Weak as he was, he flung 
himself upon his work. "I employ myself incessantly, 



vi.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 165 

taking, however, every day as much exercise as I can bear 
without injurious fatigue, which is not much." " It would 
surprise you were you to see what I get through in a day." 
" For the first week I did as much every day as would at 
other times have seemed the full and overflowing produce 
of three." From his early discipline in the stoical philos- 
ophy some help now was gained ; from his active and elas- 
tic mind the gain was more ; but these would have been 
insufficient to support him without a heart-felt and ever- 
present faith that what he had lost was not lost for ever. 
A great change had indeed come upon him. He set his 
house in order, and made arrangements as if his own 
death were at hand. He resolved not to be unhappy, but 
the joyousness of his disposition had received its death- 
wound ; he felt as if he had passed at once from boyhood 
to the decline of life. He tried dutifully to make head 
against his depression, but at times with poor success. " I 
employ myself, and have recovered strength, but in point 
of spirits I rather lose ground." Still, there are hidden 
springs of comfort. " The head and flower of my earthly 
happiness is cut off. But I am not unhappy." " When I 
give way to tears, which is only in darkness or solitude, 
they are not tears of unmingled pain." All beloved ones 
grew more precious ; the noble fortitude of his wife made 
her more than ever a portion of his best self. His uncle's 
boy, Edward, he could not love more than he had loved 
him before ; but, " as far as possible, he will be to me here- 
after," writes Southey, " in the place of my son." And in 
truth the blessing of Herbert's boyhood remained with him 
still ; a most happy, a most beautiful boyhood it had been ; 
he was thankful for having possessed the child so long; 
" for worlds I would not but have been his father." " I 
have abundant blessings left ; for each and all of these I 



166 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

am truly thankful ; but of all the blessings which God has 
given me, this child, who is removed, is the one I still prize 
the most." To relieve feelings which he dared not utter 
with his lips, he thought of setting about a monument in 
verse for Herbert and himself, which might make one in- 
separable memory for father and son. A page or two of 
fragmentary thoughts in verse and prose for this poetic 
monument exists, but Southey could not keep his imagi- 
nation enough above his heart to dare to go on with it; 
to do so would have dissolved his heart anew. One or two 
of these holy scriptures of woe, truly red drops of South- 
£y's life-blood, will tell enough of this love passing the 
love of women. 

" Thy life was a day ; and sum it well, life is but a week of 
such days — with how much storm and cold and darkness ! 
Thine was a sweet spring day — a vernal Sabbath, all sun- 
shine, hope, and promise." 

"And that name 
In sacred silence buried, which was still 
At morn and eve the never- wearying theme 
Of dear discourse." 



" Playful thoughts 
Turned now to gall and esil." 



" No more great attempts, only a few autumnal flowers like 
econd primroses, etc." 

" They who look for me in our Father's kingdom 
Will look for him also ; inseparably 
Shall we be remembered." 



"Come, then, 
Pain and Infirmity — appointed guests, 
My heart is ready." 



vl] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 167 

From the day of his son's death Southey began to step 
down from the heights of life, with a steadfast foot, and 
head still held erect. He recovered cheerfulness, but it 
was as one who has undergone an amputation seeks the 
sunshine. Herbert's grave anchored him in Keswick. An 
offer of 2000Z. a year for a daily article in the Times did 
not tempt him to London. His home, his books, his 
literary work, Skiddaw, Derwentwater, and Crosthwaite 
churchyard were too dear. Three years later came the 
unlooked-for birth of a second boy ; and Cuthbert was 
loved by his father ; but the love was chastened and con- 
trolled of autumnal beauty and seriousness. 

When the war with France had ended, depression of 
trade was acutely felt in England ; party spirit ran high, 
and popular passions were dangerously roused. In the 
spring of 1817, the Laureate saw to his astonishment a 
poem entitled Wat Tyler, by Robert Southey, advertised 
as just published. He had written this lively dramatic 
sketch in the full fervour of Republicanism twenty-three 
years previously; the manuscript had passed into other 
hands, and he had long ceased to think of it. The skulk- 
ing rogue and the knavish publisher who now gave it to 
the world had chosen their time judiciously ; this rebuke 
to the apostate of the Quarterly would be a sweet morsel 
for gossip -mongers to roll under the tongue, an infallible 
pill to purge melancholy with all true children of progress. 
No fewer than sixty thousand copies, it is said, were sold. 
Wat Tyler suited well with Southey's nonage ; it has a 
bright rhetorical fierceness of humanity. The speech-mak- 
ing radical blacksmith, " still toiling, yet still poor," his in- 
sulted daughter, her virtuous lover, the communist priest 
John Ball, whose amiable theology might be that of Mr. 
Belsham in his later days, stand over against the tyrant 



168 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

king, his Archiepiscopal absolver from oaths, the haughty 
nobles, and the servile minions of the law. There was 
nothing in the poem that could be remembered with 
shame, unless it is shameful to be generous and inexperi- 
enced at the age of twenty* But England in 1817 seem- 
ed charged with combustibles, and even so small a spark 
as this was not to be blown about without a care. The 
Prince Regent had been fired at; there were committals 
for treason ; there were riots in Somersetshire ; the swarm 
of Manchester Blanketeers announced a march to London ; 
the Habeas Corpus was suspended; before the year was 
out, Brandreth and his fellows had been executed at Der- 
by. Southey applied to the Court of Chancery for an in- 
junction to restrain the publication of his poem. It was 
refused by Lord Eldon, on the ground that the publica- 
tion being one calculated to do injury to society, the au- 
thor could not reclaim his property in it. There the mat- 
ter might have dropped ; but it seemed good to Mr. Wil- 
liam Smith, representing liberal Norwich, where Southey 
had many friends, to take his seat in the House of Com- 
mons one evening with the Quarterly Review in one pock- 
et and Wat Tyler in the other, and to read aloud con- 
trasted extracts showing how the malignant renegade could 
play the parts, as it suited him, of a seditious firebrand 
and a servile courtier. Wynn on the spot administered a 
well-deserved rebuke ; Wilberforce wrote to Southey that, 
had he been present, his voice would also have been heard. 
Coleridge vindicated him in the Courier. Seldom, indeed, 
was Southey drawn into controversy. When pelted with 
abuse, he walked on with uplifted head, and did not turn 
round ; it seemed to him that he was of a stature to in- 
vite bespattering. His self-confidence was high and calm ; 
that he possessed no common abilities, was certain : and 



tl] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 169 

the amount of toil which went into his books gave him a 
continual assurance of their worth which nothing could 
gainsay ; he had no time f o#moods of dejection and self- 
distrust. But if Southey struck, he struck with force, 
and tried to leave his mark on his antagonist. To repel 
this attack made in the House of Commons, was a duty. 
A Letter to William Smith, Esq., M.P., was written, as 
Wordsworth wished, with the strength of masculine indig- 
nation ; blow after blow is planted with sure effect ; no 
word is wasted; there is skill in the hard hitting; and 
the antagonist fairly overthrown, Southey, with one glance 
of scorn, turns on his heel, and moves lightly away. " I 
wish you joy," wrote Walter Scott, " of your triumphant 
answer. . . . Enough of this gentleman, who I think will 
not walk out of the round again to slander the conduct of 
individuals." The concluding sentences of the Letter give 
in brief Southey 's fearless review of his unstained career. 

" How far the writings of Mr. Southey may be found to de- 
serve a favourable acceptance from after-ages, time will de- 
cide ; but a name which, whether worthily or not, has been 
conspicuous in the literary history of its age, will certainly 
not perish. ... It will be related that he lived in the bosom 
of his family, in absolute retirement ; that in all his writings 
there breathed the same abhorrence of oppression and immo' 
rality, the same spirit of devotion, and the same ardent wishes 
for the melioration of mankind ; and that the only charge 
which malice could bring against him was, that as he grew 
older, his opinions altered concerning the means by which 
that melioration was to be effected, and that as he learnt to 
understand the institutions of his country, he learnt to appre- 
ciate them rightly, to love, and to revere, and to defend them. 
It will be said of him that in an age of personality he ab- 
stained from satire ; and that during the course of his liter- 
ary life, often as he was assailed, the only occasion on which 
M 8* 12 



SOUTHEY. 
, [chap. 

of renegade. Onth^Zl^r^ With the appeUation 
himself^ it became h im r^ VI * ^^ ™ icated 
with Just and meZr^ZX JZT ^^^" 

vis^ tnZT isf 3 ri t " 7 % , ° f DOti0e - ™» 
Byron "IsSontL ' made the acQ ™»tance of 
„,! v bouthe y Magnanimous?" Byron asked R„ 

ers, remembering how he had *-;»* k- Rog " 

on flSofafc and^ oc £' le c d ^ S Wlt ln ^ days 

A Lt wi^ir^ 1 ? Sapphics -" ^ 

■ order. His pro^ perfect ^/f ^ " « the fc ' 
too much of poetrv ZT' " F ° babl y written 

will probably'c X bu L'r 611 ^ 6116 ^ 011 ' P ° Sterit y 
tbing" AtaI erd I R 6 has P assa S<* oqual to any- 

«* "the &st ptm o tfeT " t* ^^ ^ 
days," what better ZT t T tteSe ^ modest 



vi.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 171 

though not yet printed. Southey heard of these things, 
and felt released from that restraint of good feeling which 
made him deal tenderly in his writings with every one to 
whom he had once given his hand. An attack upon him- 
self would not alone have roused Southey ; no man re- 
ceived abuse with more self-possession. Political antago- 
nism would still have left him able to meet a fellow-poet 
on the common ground of literature. When distress fast- 
ened upon Leigh Hunt, whose Examiner and Liberal had 
never spared the Laureate, Mr. Forster did not hesitate to 
apply to Southey for assistance, which was declined solely 
'"because the circular put forward Leigh Hunt's political 
services as those chiefly entitling him to relief. "Those 
who are acquainted with me," Southey wrote, " know that 
I am neither resentful nor intolerant ;" and after expressing 
admiration of Leigh Hunt's powers, the letter goes on to 
suggest that his friends should draw up a circular in which, 
without compromising any of his opinions, the appeal 
might be made solely upon the score of literary merit, 
"placing him thus, as it were, within the sacred territory 
which ought always to be considered and respected as 
neutral ground." Wise and admirable words ! But there 
was one offence which was to Southey the unforgivable 
sin against the holy spirit of a nation's literature. To en- 
tice poetry from the altar, and to degrade her for the pleas- 
ure of wanton imaginations, seemed to Southey, feeling as 
he did the sanctity of the love of husband and wife, of fa- 
ther and child, to be treason against humanity. Southey 
was, indeed, tolerant of a certain Rabelaisian freedom in 
playing with some of the enclosed incidents of our life. 
" All the greatest of poets," he says, " have had a spice of 
Pantagruelism in their composition, which I verily believe 
was essential to their greatness." But to take an extrava- 



172 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

gant fling in costume of a sans-culotte, and to play the part 
of " pander-general to the youth of Great Britain," were 
different things. In his preface to A Vision of Judgment, 
Southey deplored the recent fall in the ethical spirit of 
English literature, " which for half a century had been dis- 
tinguished for its moral purity," and much of the guilt he 
laid on the leaders of " the Satanic School." In the long- 
run the interests of art, as of all high endeavour, are in- 
variably proved to be one with the interest of a nation's 
morality. It had taken many lives of men to lift liter- 
ature out of the beast. From prudential virtue and the 
lighter ethics of Addison it had risen to the grave moral 
dignity of Johnson, and from that to the impassioned spir- 
ituality of Wordsworth. Should all this be abandoned, 
and should literature now be permitted to reel back into 
the brute? We know that the title "Satanic School" 
struck home, that Byron was moved, and replied with brill- 
iant play of wit in his Vision of Judgment. The laugh- 
ers went over to Byron's side. One who would be witty 
has certain advantages, if content to disregard honesty and 
good manners. To be witty was not Southey's concern. 
" I saw," he said, many years after, " that Byron was a 
man of quick impulses, strong passions, and great powers. 
I saw him abuse these powers ; and, looking at the effect 
of his writings on the public mind, it was my duty to de- 
nounce such of them as aimed at the injury of morals and 
religion. This was all." If continental critics find in 
what he set down a characteristic example of the bourgeois 
morality of England, we note with interest their point of 
view. 1 

1 To certain false allegations of fact made by Byron, Southey re- 
plied in The Courier, and reprinted his letters in Essays, Moral and 
Political, vol. ii. pp. 183-205. 



▼I.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 173 

" Bertha, Kate, and Isabel," wrote Southey on June 26, 
1820, "you have been very good girls, and have written 
me very nice letters, with which I was much pleased. 
This is the last letter which I can write in return ; and as 
I happen to have a quiet hour to myself here at Streatham, 
on Monday noon, I will employ that hour in relating to 
you the whole history and manner of my being ell-ell-deed 
at Oxford by the Vice-Chancellor." Public distinctions of 
this kind he rated, perhaps, below their true value. To 
stand well with Murray and Longman was more to him 
than any handle to his name. A similar honour from 
Cambridge he declined. His gold medal from the Royal 
Society of Literature he changed for a silver coffee-pot for 
Mrs. Southey. To " be be-doctored and called everything 
that ends in issimus," was neither any harm nor much 
good ; but to take his seat between such doctors as the 
Duke of Wellington, and — perhaps — Sir Walter Scott was 
a temptation. When his old school - fellow Phillimore 
presented Southey, the theatre rang with applause. Yet 
the day was, indeed, one of the heaviest in his life. Never 
had he stopped for a night in Oxford since he left it in 
1794, intending to bid farewell to Europe for an Utopia 
in some back settlement of America. Not one who really 
loved him — for Scott could not appear — was present. 
When in the morning he went to look at Balliol, no one 
remembered him except old Adams, who had attempted 
to dress his hair as a freshman, and old Mrs. Adams, the 
laundress, both now infirm. From the tumultuous theatre 
Southey strolled into Christ Church walks alone. What 
changes time had made ! Many of the friends with whom 
he had sauntered there were in their graves. So brooding^ 
he chewed the bitter-sweet of remembrance, until at length 
a serious gratitude prevailed. " Little girls," the letter 



174 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

ends, " you know it might be proper for me now to wear 
a large wig, and to be called Doctor Southey, and to be- 
come very severe, and leave off being a comical papa. 
And if you should find that ell-ell-deeing has made this 
difference in me, you will not be surprised. However, I 
shall not come down in my wig, neither shall I wear my 
robes at home." 

While in Holland, in the summer of 1826, a more con- 
spicuous honour was unexpectedly thrust upon Southey. 
The previous year he had gone abroad with Henry Tay- 
lor, and at Douay was bitten on the foot by Satan, ac- 
cording to his conjecture, sitting squat at his great toe; 
at Leyden he was obliged to rest his inflamed foot, and 
there it was his good fortune to be received into the house 
of the poet Bilderdijk, a delightful old erudite and enthu- 
siast, whose charming wife was the translator of Roderick. 
In 1826 he visited his kind friends once more, and at 
Brussels received the surprising intelligence that during 
his absence he had been elected a member of Parliament. 
Lord Radnor, an entire stranger, had read with admiration 
Southey's confession of faith concerning Church and State, 
in the last paragraph of his Book of the Church. By his 
influence the poet had been elected for the borough of 
Downton : the return, however, was null, for Southey held 
a pension during pleasure ; and even if this were resigned, 
where was the property qualification? This latter objec- 
tion was met by Sir Robert Inglis, who desired to know 
whether Southey would sit in Parliament if an estate of 
300£. a year were purchased for him. An estate of 300£. 
a year would be a very agreeable thing to Robert Lack- 
land ; but he had no mind to enter on a new public sphere 
for which he was ill qualified by his previous life, to risk 
the loss of health by midnight debates, to abandon the 



vi.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 175 

education of his little boy, and to separate himself more 
or less from his wife and daughters. He could not be 
wrong, he believed, in the quiet confidence which as- 
sured him that he was in his proper place. 

Now more than ever before, Edith Southey needed her 
husband's sustaining love. On the day of his return to Kes- 
wick, while amused to find himself the object of mob pop- 
ularity, he learnt that one of his daughters was ailing ; the 
illness, however, already seemed to have passed the worst. 
This appearance of amendment quickly proved deceptive ; 
and, on a Sunday evening in mid July, Isabel, " the most 
radiant creature that I ever beheld or shall behold," passed 
away, while her father was on his knees in the room be- 
low, praying that she might be released from suffering 
either by recovery or by death. All that had been gone 
through ten years before, renewed itself with dread exact* 
ness. Now, as then, the first day was one of stunned in- 
sensibility; now, as then, the next morning found him 
weak as a child, and striving in his weakness to comfort 
those who needed his support ; now, as then, he turned to 
Grosvenor Bedford for a heart on which he might lay 
his own heart prone, letting his sorrow have its way. 
" Nothing that has assailed my character, or affected my 
worldly fortune, ever gave me an hour's vexation, or de- 
prived me of an hour's rest. My happiness has been in 
my family, and there only was I vulnerable ; that family 
is now divided between earth and heaven, and I must pray 
to remain with those who are left, so long as I can con- 
tribute to their welfare and comfort, rather than be gath- 
ered (as otherwise I would fain be) to those who are 
gone." On that day of which the word TeTiketrrai is the 
record, the day on which the body of his bright Isabel 
was committed to earth, Southey wrote a letter to his three 



176 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

living daughters, copied with his own hand for each. It 
said what he could not bear to say of consolation and 
admonishment by word of mouth ; it prepared them for 
the inevitable partings to come; it urged on them with 
measureless tenderness the duty of self - watchfulness, of 
guarding against little faults, of bearing and forbearing; 
it told them of his own grief to think that he should ever 
by a harsh or hasty word have given their dead sister 
even a momentary sorrow which might have been spared ; 
it ended with the blessing of their afflicted father. 

Sorrows of this kind, as Southey has truly said, come 
the heavier when they are repeated; under such strokes 
a courageous heart may turn coward. On Mrs. Southey 
a weight as of years had been laid ; her spirits sank, 
her firmness gave way, a breath of danger shook her. 
Southey's way of bearing himself towards the dead is that 
saddest way — their names were never uttered; each one 
of the household had, as it were, a separate chamber in 
which the images of their dead ones lay, and each went 
in alone and veiled. The truth is, Southey had little na- 
tive hardihood of temperament; self-control with him 
was painfully acquired. In solitude and darkness his 
tears flowed; when in his slumbers the images of the 
dead came to him, he could not choose but weep. There- 
fore, all the more among those whom he wished to lead 
into the cheerful ways of life, he had need to keep a guard 
upon his tenderness. He feared to preserve relics, and 
did not like to bear in mind birthdays, lest they should 
afterwards become too dangerously charged with remem- 
brance and grief. " Look," he writes, " at some verses in 
the Literary Souvenir, p. 113 ; they are written by a dear 
friend of mine on the death of — you will know who" — 
for his pen would have trembled in tracing the name Isa- 



vi.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1840. m 

bel. And yet his habitual feelings with respect to those 
who had departed were not bitter ; the dead were absent 
— that was all ; he thought of them and of living friends 
at a distance with the same complacency, the same affec- 
tion, only with more tenderness of the dead. 

Greta Hall, once resounding with cheerful voices, had 
been growing silent. Herbert was gone ; Isabel was gone. 
In 1829 Sara Coleridge went, a bride, tearful yet glad, her 
mother accompanying her, to distant London. Five years 
later, Edith May Southey became the wife of the Rev. John 
Warter. Her father fell back, even more than in former 
years, upon the never-failing friends of his library. It was 
in these darkening years that he sought relief in carrying 
out the idea, conceived long before, of a story which should 
be no story, but a spacious receptacle for mingled wit and 
wisdom, experience and book-lore, wholesome nonsense and 
solemn meditation. The Doctor, begun in jest after merry 
talks with Grosvenor Bedford, grew more and more earnest 
as Southey proceeded. " He dreamt over it and brooded 
over it, laid it aside for months and years, resumed it after 
(ong intervals, and more often, latterly, in thoughtfulness 
than in mirth, and fancied at last that he could put into it 
more of his mind than could conveniently be produced in 
any other form." The secret of its authorship was care- 
fully kept. Southey amused himself somewhat laborious- 
ly with ascribing it now to this hand and now to that. 
When the first two volumes arrived, as if from the anony- 
mous author, Southey thrust them away with well-assumed 
impatience, and the disdainful words, " Some novel, I sup- 
pose." Yet several of his friends had shrewd suspicions 
that the manuscript lay somewhere hidden in Greta Hall, 
and on receiving their copies wrote to thank the veritable 
donor ; these thanks were forwarded by Southey, not with- 



178 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

out a smile in which something of irony mingled, to The- 
odore Hook, who was not pleased to enter into the jest. 
"I see in The Doctor" says its author, playing the part of 
an impartial critic, " a little of Rabelais, but not much ; 
more of Tristram Shandy, somewhat of Burton, and per- 
haps more of Montaigne ; but rnethinks the quintum quid 
predominates ?" The quintum quid is that wisdom of the 
heart, that temper of loyal and cheerful acquiescence in the 
rule of life as appointed by a Divine Master, which charac- 
terizes Southey. 

For the third volume of The Doctor, in that chapter 
which tells of Leonard Bacon's sorrow for his Margaret, 
Southey wrote as follows : 

" Leonard had looked for consolation, where, when sincere- 
ly sought, it is always to be found ; and he had experienced 
that religion effects in a true believer all that philosophy 
professes, and more than all that mere philosophy can perform. 
The wounds which stoicism would cauterize, religion heals. 

There is a resignation with which, it may be feared, most 
of us deceive ourselves. To bear what must be borne, and 
submit to what cannot be resisted, is no more than what the 
unregenerate heart is taught by the instinct of animal nature. 
But to acquiesce in the afflictive dispensations of Providence 
— to make one's own will conform in all things to that of our 
Heavenly Father — to say to him in the sincerity of faith, when 
we drink of the bitter cup, ' Thy will be done !' — to bless 
the name of the Lord as much from the heart when he takes 
away as when he gives, and with a depth of feeling of which, 
perhaps, none but the afflicted heart is capable — this is the 
resignation which religion teaches, this is the sacrifice which 
it requires." 

These words, written with no forefeeling, were the last 
put on paper before the great calamity burst upon South- 
ey. " I have been parted from my wife," he tells Gros- 



vi.] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 179 

venor Bedford on October 2, 1834, "by something worse 
than death. Forty years she has been the life of my life ; 
and I have left her this day in a lunatic asylum." 

Southey's union with his wife had been at the first one 
of love, and use and wont had made her a portion of his 
very being. Their provinces in the household had soon 
defined themselves. He in the library earned their means 
of support ; all else might be left to her with absolute con- 
fidence in her wise contrivance and quiet energy. Beneath 
the divided work in their respective provinces their lives 
ran on in deep and still accord. Now he felt for the first 
time shrunk into the limits of a solitary will. All that 
had grown out of the past was deranged by a central dis- 
turbance ; no branch had been lopped away, but the main 
trunk was struck, and seared, and shaken to the roots. 
" Mine is a strong heart," Southey writes ; " I will not say 
that the last week has been the most trying of my life ; 
but I will say that the heart which could bear it can bear 
anything." Yet, when he once more set himself to work, 
a common observer, says his son, would have noticed little 
change in him, though to his family the change was great 
indeed. His most wretched hour was when he woke at 
dawn from broken slumbers; but a word of hope was 
enough to counteract the mischief of a night's unrest. No 
means were neglected which might serve to keep him in 
mental and bodily health ; he walked in all weathers ; he 
pursued his task-work diligently, yet not over-diligently ; 
he collected materials for work of his choice. When, in 
the spring of 1835, it was found that the sufferer might re- 
turn to wear out the body of this death in her own home, 
it was marvellous, declares Cuthbert Southey, how much of 
his old elasticity remained, and how, though no longer hap- 
py, he could be contented and cheerful, and take pleasure 



180 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

in the pleasures of others. He still could contribute some- 
thing to his wife's comfort. Through the weary dream 
which was now her life she knew him, and took pleasure in 
his coming and going. 

When Herbert died, Southey had to ask a friend to 
lend him money to tide over the short period of want 
which followed his weeks of enforced inaction,- Happily 
now, for the first time in his life, his income was before- 
hand with his expenses. A bequest of some hundreds of 
pounds had come in ; his Naval Biographies were paying 
him well ; and during part of Mrs. Southey's illness he was 
earning a respectable sum, intended for his son's educa- 
tion, by his Life of Cowper — a work to which a painful in- 
terest was added by the study of mental alienation forced 
upon him in his own household. So the days passed, not 
altogether cheerlessly, in work if possible more arduous 
than ever. M One morning," writes his son, " shortly after 
the letters had arrived, he called me into his study. * You 
will be surprised,' he said, ' to hear that Sir Robert Peel 
has recommended me to the King for the distinction of 
a baronetcy, and will probably feel some disappointment 
when I tell you that I shall not accept it.' " Accompany- 
ing Sir Robert Peel's official communication came a pri- 
vate letter asking in the kindest manner how he could be 
of use to Southey. " "Will you tell me," he said, " with- 
out reserve, whether the possession of power puts within 
my reach the means of doing anything which can be ser- 
viceable or acceptable to you ; and whether you will allow 
me to find some compensation for the many sacrifices 
which office imposes upon me, in the opportunity of mark- 
ing my gratitude, as a public man, for the eminent services 
you have rendered, not only to literature, but to the high- 
er interests of virtue and religion?" Southey's answei 



vl] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 181 

stated simply what his circumstances were, showing how 
unbecoming and unwise it would be to accept the proffer- 
ed honour : it told the friendly statesman of the provision 
made for his family — no inconsiderable one — in the event 
of his death ; it went on to speak of his recent affliction ; 
how this had sapped his former confidence in himself; 
how it had made him an old man, and forced upon him 
the reflection that a sudden stroke might deprive him of 
those faculties by which his family had hitherto been sup- 
ported. " I could afford to die, but not to be disabled," 
he wrote in his first draft ; but fearing that these words 
would look as if he wanted to trick out pathetically a 
plain statement, he removed them. Finally, if such an in- 
crease of his pension as would relieve him from anxiety 
on behalf of his family could form part of a plan for the 
encouragement of literature, it would satisfy all his desires. 
" Young as I then was," Cuthbert Southey writes, " I could 
not, without tears, hear him read with his deep and falter- 
ing voice, his wise refusal and touching expression of those 
feelings and fears he had never before given utterance to, 
to any of his own family." Two months later Sir Robert 
Peel signed a warrant adding 3001. annually to Southey's 
existing pension. He had resolved to recognize literary 
and scientific eminence as a national claim; the act was 
done upon public grounds, and Southey had the happiness 
of knowing that others beside himself would partake of 
the benefit. 

" Our domestic prospects are darkening upon us daily," 
Southey wrote in July, 1835. "I know not whether the 
past or the present seems most like a dream to me, so 
great and strange is the difference. But yet a little while, 
and all will again be at the best." While Mrs. Southey 
lived, a daily demand was made upon his sympathies and 



182 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

solicitude which it was his happiness to fulfil. But from 
all except his wife he seemed already to be dropping away 
into a state of passive abstraction. Kate and Bertha si- 
lently ministered to his wants, laid the books he wanted in 
his way, replenished his ink-bottle, mended his pens, stir- 
red the fire, and said nothing. A visit to the south-west 
of England in company with his son broke the long mo- 
notony of endurance. It was a happiness to meet Landor 
at Bristol, and Mrs. Bray at Tavistock, and Mrs. Bray's 
friend, the humble poet, Mary Colling, whose verses he 
had reviewed in the Quarterly. Yet to return to his sor- 
rowful home was best of all; there is a leap up of the 
old spirits in a letter to his daughters announcing his ap- 
proach. It is almost the last gleam of brightness. In 
the autumn of that year (1835) Edith Southey wasted 
away, growing weaker and weaker. The strong arm on 
which she had leaned for two-and-forty years, supported 
her down stairs each day and bore her up again at even- 
ing. When the ruorning of November 16th broke, she 
passed quietly " from death unto life." 

From that day Southey was an altered man. His spir- 
its fell to a still lower range. For the first time he was 
conscious of the distance which years had set between him 
and his children. Yet his physical strength was unbroken ; 
nothing but snow deterred him from his walk; he could 
still circle the lake, or penetrate into Borrowdale on foot. 
But Echo, whom he had summoned to rejoice, was not 
roused by any call of his. Within-doors it was only by a 
certain violence to himself that he could speak. In the 
library he read aloud his proof-sheets alone ; but for this 
he might almost have forgotten the sound of his own voice. 
Still, he was not wholly abandoned to grief ; he looked 
back and saw that life had been good ; its hardest moral 



tl] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 183 

discipline had served to train the heart : much still remain- 
ed that was of worth — Cuthbert was quietly pursuing his 
Oxford studies ; Bertha was about to be united in marriage 
to her cousin, Herbert Hill, son of that good uncle who 
had done so much to shape Southey' s career. "If not 
hopeful," he writes, " I am more than contented, and dis- 
posed to welcome and entertain any good that may yet be 
in store for me, without any danger of being disappointed 
if there should be none." Hope of a sober kind indeed 
had come to him. For twenty years he had known Caro- 
line Bowles ; they had long been in constant correspond- 
ence ; their acquaintance had matured into friendship. 
She was now in her fifty -second year; he in his sixty- 
fifth. It seemed to Southey natural that, without mak- 
ing any breach with his past life, he should accept her 
companionship in the nearest way possible, should give to 
her all he could of what remained, and save himself from 
that forlorn feeling which he feared might render old age 
miserable and useless. 

But already the past had subdued Southey, and if any 
future lay before him it was a cloud lifeless and grey. In 
the autumn of 1838 he started for a short tour on the 
Continent with his old friend Senhouse, his son Cuthbert, 
John Kenyon, their master of the horse, Captain Jones, the 
chamberlain, and Crabb Robinson, who was intendant and 
paid the bills. On the way from Boulogne they turned 
aside to visit Chinon, for Southey wished to stand on the 
spot where his first heroine, Joan of Arc, had recognized 
the French king. At Paris he roamed along the quays 
and hunted bookstalls. The change and excitement seem- 
ed to have served him ; he talked freely and was cheerful. 
" Still," writes his son, " I could not fail to perceive a con- 
siderable change in him from the time we had last travel- 



184 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

led together — all his movements were slower, he was sub- 
ject to frequent fits of absence, and there was an indeci- 
sion in his manner and an unsteadiness in his step which 
was wholly unusual with him." He often lost his way, 
even in the hotels ; then laughed at his own mistakes, and 
yet was painfully conscious of his failing memory. His 
journal breaks off abruptly when not more than two-thirds 
of the tour had been accomplished. In February, 1839, 
his brother, Dr. Southey — ever a true comrade — describes 
him as working slowly and with an abstraction not usual 
to him ; sometimes to write even a letter seemed an effort. 
In midsummer his marriage to Caroline Bowles took place, 
and with her he returned to Keswick in August. On the 
way home his friends in London saw that he was much al- 
tered. " The animation and peculiar clearness of his mind," 
wrote Henry Taylor, "was quite gone, except a gleam or 
two now and then. . . . The appearance was that of a 
placid languor, sometimes approaching to torpor, but not 
otherwise than cheerful. He is thin and shrunk in person, 
and that extraordinary face of his has no longer the fire 
and strength it used to have, though the singular cast of 
the features and the habitual expressions make it still a 
most remarkable phenomenon." Still, his friends had not 
ceased to hope that tranquillity would restore mental tone, 
and he himself was planning the completion of great de- 
signs. "As soon as we are settled at Keswick, I shall res- 
olutely begin upon the History of Portugal, as a duty 
which I owe to my uncle's memory. Half of the labour 
I consider as done. But I have long since found the ad- 
vantage of doing more than one thing at a time, and the 
History of the Monastic Orders is the other thing to which 
I shall set to with hearty good-will. Both these are works 
of great pith and moment." 



yl] CHANGES AND EVENTS, 1803—1843. 185 

Alas ! the current of these enterprises was already turned 
awry. In August it was not without an occasional uncer- 
tainty that he sustained conversation. " He lost himself 
for a moment ; he was conscious of it, and an expression 
passed over his countenance which was very touching — an 
expression of pain and also of resignation. . . . The charm 
of his manner is perhaps even enhanced at present (at 
least when one knows the circumstances) by the gentleness 
and patience which pervade it." Before long the charac- 
ter of his handwriting, which had been so exquisite, was 
changed to something like the laboured scrawl of a child ; 
then he ceased to write. Still he could read, and, even 
when he could no longer take in the meaning of what was 
before him, his eye followed the lines of the printed page. 
At last even this was beyond his power. He would walk 
slowly round his library, pleased with the presence of his 
cherished possessions, taking some volume down mechani- 
cally from the shelf. In 1 840 Wordsworth went over to 
Greta Hall. " Southey did not recognize me," he writes, 
"till he was told. Then his eyes flashed for a moment 
with their former brightness, but he sank into the state in 
which I had found him, patting with both hands his books 
affectionately like a child." In the Life of Cowper he had 
spoken of the distress of one who suffers from mental 
disease as being that of a dream — " a dream, indeed, from 
which the sufferer can neither wake nor be awakened ; but 
it pierces no deeper, and there seems to be the same dim 
consciousness of its unreality." So was it now with him- 
self. Until near the end he retained considerable bodily 
strength; his snow-white hair grew darker; it was the 
spirit which had endured shattering strokes of fate, and 
which had spent itself in studying to be quiet. 

After a short attack of fever, the end came on the 21st 
N 9 18 



186 SOUTHEY. [chap. vi. 

of March, 1843. Never was that " Well done !" the guer- 
don of the good and faithful servant, pronounced amid a 
deeper consent of those who attended and had ears to 
hear. On a dark and stormy morning Southey's body was 
borne to the beautiful churchyard of Crosthwaite, towards 
which he had long looked affectionately as his place of 
rest. There lay his three children and she who was the 
life of his life. Skiddaw gloomed solemnly overhead. A 
grey-haired, venerable man who had crossed the hills stood 
there leaning on the arm of his son-in-law; these two, 
Wordsworth and Quillinan, were the only strangers pres- 
ent. As the words, " ashes to ashes," were uttered, a sud- 
den gleam of sunshine touched the grave ; the wind drop- 
ped, the rain was over, and the birds had begun their songs 
of spring. The mourners turned away thinking of a good 
man's life and death with peace — 

"And calm of mind, all passion spent." 



CHAPTER VII. 
southey's work in literature. 

Southey's career of authorship falls into two chief periods 
— a period during which poetry occupied the higher place 
and prose the lower, and a period during which this order 
was reversed. His translations of romantic fiction — Ama- 
dis of Gaul, Palmerin of England, and The Cid — connect 
the work of the earlier with that of the latter period, and 
serve to mark the progress of his mind from legend to 
history, and from the fantastic to the real. The poet in 
Southey died young, or, if he did not die, fell into a 
numbness and old age like that of which an earlier singer 

writes : — 

" Elde that in my spirit dulleth me, 
Hath of endyting all the subtirite" 
Welnyghe bereft out of my remembraunce." 

After thirty Southey seldom cared to utter himself in 
occasional verse. The uniformity of his life, the equable 
cheerfulness maintained by habits of regular work, his 
calm religious faith, his amiable Stoicism, left him without 
the material for lyrical poetry; and one so honest and 
healthy had no care to feign experiences of the heart 
which were not his. Still, he could apply himself to the 
treatment of large subjects with a calm, continuous ener- 
gy ; but as time went on his hand grew slack, and wrought 



188 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

with less ease. Scarcely had he overcome the narrative 
poet's chief difficulty, that of subduing varied materials to 
an unity of design, when he put aside verse, and found it 
more natural to be historian than poet. 

The poetry of sober feeling is rare in lyrical verse. This 
may be found admirably rendered in some of Southey's 
shorter pieces. Although his temper was ardent and 
hopeful, his poems of pensive remembrance, of meditative 
calm, are perhaps the most characteristic. Among these 
his Inscriptions rank high. Some of those in memory of 
the dead are remarkable for their fine poise of feeling, all 
that is excessive and transitory having been subdued ; for 
the tranquil depths of sorrow and of hope which lie be- 
neath their clear, melodious words. 

Southey's larger poetical works are fashioned of two 
materials which do not always entirely harmonize. First, 
material brought from his own moral nature; his admi- 
ration of something elevated in the character of man or 
woman — generosity, gentleness, loyalty, fortitude, faith. 
And, secondly, material gathered from abroad ; mediaeval 
pomps of religion and circumstance of war ; Arabian mar- 
vels, the work of the enchanters and the genii ; the wild 
beauties and adventure of life amid New-World tribes ; the 
monstrous mythology of the Brahman. With such mate- 
rial the poet's inventive talent deals freely, rearranges de- 
tails or adds to them ; still Southey is here rather a finder 
than a maker. His diligence in collecting and his skill 
in arranging were so great that it was well if the central 
theme did not disappear among manifold accessories. One 
who knows Southey, however, can recognize his ethical 
spirit in every poem. Thalaba, as he himself confessed, 
is a male Joan of Arc. Destiny or Providence has mark- 
ed alike the hero and the heroine from mankind; the 



til] SOUTHEY'S WORK IN LITERATURE. 189 

sheepfold of Domremi, and the palni-grove by old Moath's 
tent, alike nurture virgin purity and lofty aspiration. Tha- 
laba, like Joan, goes forth a delegated servant of the High- 
est to war against the powers of evil ; Thalaba, like Joan, 
is sustained under the trials of the way by the sole talis- 
man of faith. We are not left in doubt as to where South- 
ey found his ideal. Mr. Barbauld thought Joan of Arc 
was modelled on the Socinian Christ. He was mistaken ; 
Southey's ideal was native to his soul. "Early admira- 
tion, almost adoration of Leonidas; early principles of 
Stoicism derived from the habitual study of Epictetus, 
and the French Revolution at its height when I was just 
eighteen — by these my mind was moulded." And from 
these, absorbed into Southey's very being, came Thalaba 
and Joan. 

The word high-souled takes possession of the mind as 
we think of Southey's heroic personages. Poetry, he held, 
ought rather to elevate than to affect — a Stoical doctrine 
transferred to art, which meant that his own poetry was 
derived more from admiration of great qualities than from 
sympathy with individual men or women. Neither the 
quick and passionate tenderness of Burns nor the stringent 
pathos of Wordsworth can be found in Southey's verse. 
No eye probably ever shed a tear over the misery of La- 
durlad and his persecuted daughter. She, like the lady 
in Comus, is set above our pity and perhaps our love. In 
Kehama, a work of Southey's mature years, the chivalric 
ardour of his earlier heroes is transformed into the sterner 
virtues of fortitude and an almost despairing constancy. 
The power of evil, as conceived by the poet, has grown 
more despotic ; little can be achieved by the light-winged 
Glendoveer — a more radiant Thalaba — against the Rajah ; 
only the lidless eye of Seeva can destroy that tyranny of 



190 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

lust and pride. Roderick marks a higher stage in the de- 
velopment of Southey's ethical ideal. Roderick, too, is a 
delegated champion of right against force and fraud; he 
too endures mighty pains. But he is neither such a com- 
batant, pure and intrepid, as goes forth from the Arab 
tent, nor such a blameless martyr as Ladurlad. He is first 
a sinner enduring just punishment; then a stricken peni- 
tent ; and from his shame and remorse he is at last uplift- 
ed by enthusiasm, on behalf of his God and his people, into 
a warrior saint, the Gothic Maccabee. 

Madoc stands somewhat away from the line of South- 
ey's other narrative poems. Though, as Scott objected, 
the personages in Madoc are too nearly abstract types, 
Southey's ethical spirit dominates this poem less than any 
of the others. The narrative flows on more simply. The 
New-World portion tells a story full of picturesque inci- 
dent, with the same skill and grace that belong to South- 
ey's best prose writings. Landor highly esteemed Madoc. 
Scott declared that he had read it three times since his 
first cursory perusal, and each time with increased admira- 
tion of the poetry. Fox was in the habit of reading aloud 
after supper to eleven o'clock, when it was the rule at St. 
Ann's Hill to retire ; but while Madoc w r as in his hand, he 
read until after midnight. Those, however, who opened 
the bulky quarto were few : the tale was out of relation 
with the time; it interpreted no need, no aspiration, no 
passion of the dawn of the present century. And the 
mind of the time was not enough disengaged to concern it- 
self deeply with the supposed adventures of a Welsh prince 
of the twelfth century among the natives of America. 

At heart, then, Southey's poems are in the main the 
outcome of his moral nature; this we recognize through 
all disguises — Mohammedan, Hindoo, or Catholic. He 



vn.] SOUTHEY'S WOKK IN LITERATURE. 191 

planned and partly wrote a poem — Oliver Newman — 
which should associate his characteristic ideal with Puri- 
tan principles and ways of life. The foreign material 
through which his ethical idea was set forth went far, 
with each poem, to determine its reception by the public. 
Coleridge has spoken of "the pastoral charm and wild, 
streaming lights of the ThalahaP Dewy night moon- 
mellowed, and the desert -circle girdled by the sky, the 
mystic palace of Shedad, the vernal brook, Oneiza's fa- 
vourite kidling, the lamp-light shining rosy through the 
damsel's delicate fingers, the aged Arab in the tent-door — 
these came with a fresh charm into English narrative po- 
etry eighty years ago. The landscape and the manners 
of Spain, as pictured in Roderick, are of marked grandeur 
and simplicity. In ICehama, Southey attempted a bolder 
experiment ; and although the poem became popular, even 
a well-disposed reader may be allowed to sympathize with 
the dismay of Charles Lamb among the monstrous gods : 
"I never read books of travels, at least not farther than 
Paris or Rome. I can just endure Moors, because of their 
connexion as foes with Christians ; but Abyssinians, Ethi- 
ops, Esquimaux, Dervises, and all that tribe I hate. I be- 
lieve I fear them in some manner. A Mohammedan tur- 
ban on the stage, though enveloping some well-known 
face, . . . does not give me unalloyed pleasure. I am a 
Christian, Englishman, Londoner, Templar. God help me 
when I come to put off these snug relations, and to get 
abroad into the world to come." 

Though his materials are often exotic, in style Southey 
aimed at the simplicity and strength of undefiled English. 
If to these melody was added, he had attained all he de- 
sired. To conversations with William Taylor about Ger- 
man poetry — certainly not to Taylor's example — he as- 



192 SOUTHEY. [chat. 

cribes his faith, in the power of plain words to express in 
poetry the highest thoughts and strongest feelings. He 
perceived, in his own day, the rise of the ornate style, 
which has since been perfected by Tennyson, and he re- 
garded it as a vice in art. In early years Akenside had 
been his instructor; afterwards he owed more to Landor 
than to any other master of style. From Madoc and Rod- 
erick — both in blank -verse — fragments could be severed 
which might pass for the work of Landor; but Southey's 
free and facile manner, fostered by early reading of Ari- 
osto, and by constant study of Spenser, soon reasserts it- 
self; from under the fragment of monumental marble, 
white almost as Landor's, a stream wells out smooth and 
clear, and lapses away, never dangerously swift nor mys 
teriously deep. On the whole, judged by the highest 
standards, Southey's poetry takes a midmost rank; it nei. 
ther renders into art a great body of thought and passion, 
nor does it give faultless expression to lyrical moments. 
But it is the output of a large and vigorous mind, amply 
stored with knowledge; its breath of life is the moral 
ardour of a nature strong and generous, and therefore it 
can never cease to be of worth. 

Southey is at his best in prose. And here it must be 
borne in mind that, though so voluminous a writer, he did 
not achieve his most important work, the History of Port- 
ugal, for which he had gathered vast collections. It can- 
not be doubted that this, if completed, would have taken a 
place among our chief histories. The splendour of story 
and the heroic personages would have lifted Southey into 
his highest mood. We cannot speak with equal confi- 
dence of his projected work of second magnitude, the 
History of the Monastic Orders. Learned and sensible it 
could not fail to be, and Southey would have recognized 



til] SOUTHEY'S WORK IN LITERATURE. 193 

the more substantial services of the founders and the 
brotherhoods ; but he would have dealt by methods too 
simple with the psychology of religious emotions; the 
words enthusiasm and fraud might have risen too often to 
his lips; and at the grotesque humours of the devout, 
which he would have exhibited with delight, he might 
have been too prone to smile. 

As it is, Southey's largest works are not his most admi- 
rable. The History of Brazil, indeed, gives evidence of 
amazing patience, industry, and skill ; but its subject nec- 
essarily excludes it from the first rank. At no time 
from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century was Brazil a 
leader or a banner-bearer among lands. The life of the 
people crept on from point to point, and that is all ; there 
are few passages in which the chronicle can gather itself 
up, and transform itself into a historic drama. South ey 
has done all that was possible ; his pages are rich in facts, 
and are more entertaining than perhaps any other writer 
could have made them. His extraordinary acquaintance 
with travel gave him many advantages in narrating the 
adventures of early explorers; and his studies in ecclesi- 
astical history led him to treat with peculiar interest the 
history of the Jesuit Reductions. 

The History of the Peninsular War suffers by compar- 
ison with the great work of Sir William Napier. That 
heroic man had himself been a portion of the strife ; his 
senses, singularly keen, were attuned to battle ; as he wrote, 
the wild bugle-calls, the measured tramp, the peals of mus- 
ketry, the dismal clamour, sounded in his ears ; he aban- 
doned himself again to the swiftness and "incredible 
fury" of the charge. And with his falcon eye he could 
discern amid the shock or formless dispersion, wherever 
hidden, the fiery heart of victory. Southey wrought in 
9* 



194 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

his library as a man of letters ; consulted sources, turned 
over manuscripts, corresponded with witnesses, set his ma- 
terial in order. The passion of justice and an enthusiasm 
on behalf of Spain give unity to his work. If he esti- 
mated too highly the disinterestedness and courage of the 
people of the Peninsula, the illusion was generous. And 
it may be that enduring spiritual forces become apparent 
to a distant observer, which are masked by accidents of 
the day and hour from one who is in their midst. 

History as written by Southey is narrative rendered 
spiritual by moral ardour. There are no new political 
truths, he said. If there be laws of a nation's life other 
than those connected with elementary principles of moral- 
ity, Southey did not discover these. What he has written 
may go only a little way towards attaining the ultimate 
ends of historical study, but so far as it goes it keeps the 
direct line. It is not led astray by will-o'-the-wisp, vague- 
shining theories that beguile night wanderers. Its method 
is an honest method as wholesome as sweet ; and simple 
narrative, if ripe and sound at first, is none the less so at 
the end of a century. 

In biography, at least, one may be well pleased with 
clear and charming narrative. Here Southey has not been 
surpassed, and even in this single province he is versatile ; 
he has written the life of a warrior, of a poet, and of a 
saint. His industry was that of a German ; his lucidity 
and perfect exposition were such as we rarely find outside 
a French memoir. There is no style fitter for continuous 
narrative than the pedestrian style of Southey. It does 
not beat upon the ear with hard, metallic vibration. The 
sentences are not cast by the thousand in one mould of 
cheap rhetoric, nor made brilliant with one cheap colour. 
Never dithyrambic, he is never dull ; he affects neither the 



vil] SOUTHEY'S WORK IN LITERATURE. 195 

trick of stateliness nor that of careless ease ; he does not 
seek out curiosities of refinement, nor caress delicate affec- 
tations. Because his style is natural, it is inimitable, and 
the only way to write like Southey is to write well. 

"The favourite of my library, among many favourites;" 
so Coleridge speaks of the Life of Wesley — " the book I 
can read for the twentieth time, when I can read nothing 
else at all." And yet the schoolboy's favourite — the Life 
of Nelson — is of happier inspiration. The simple and 
chivalric hero, his splendid achievements, his pride in duty, 
his patriotism, roused in Southey all that was most strong 
and high; but his enthusiasm does not escape in lyrical 
speech. " The best eulogy of Nelson," he says, " is the 
faithful history of his actions ; the best history that which 
shall relate them most perspicuously." Only when all is 
over, and the captain of Trafalgar lies dead, his passion and 
pride find utterance : — " If the chariot and the horses of 
fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson's translation, he could 
scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory." From 
Nelson on the quarter-deck of the Victory, to Cowper ca- 
ressing his tame hares, the interval is wide ; but Southey, 
the man of letters, lover of the fireside, and patron of 
cats, found it natural to sympathize with his brother poet. 
His sketches of literary history in the Life of Cowper are 
characteristic. The writer's range is wide, his judgment 
sound, his enjoyment of almost everything literary is live- 
ly ; as critic he is kindly yet equitable. But the highest 
criticism is not his. Southey's vision was not sufficiently 
penetrative ; he culls beauties, but he cannot pluck out the 
heart of a mystery. < 

His translations of romantic fiction, while faithful to 
their sources, aim less at literal exactitude than at giving 
the English reader the same pleasure which the Spaniard 



196 SOUTHEY. [chap. 

receives from the originals. From the destruction of Don 
Quixote's library Master Nicholas and the curate spared 
Amadis of Gaul and Palmerin of England. Second to 
Malory's grouping of the Arthur cycle Amadis may well 
take its place. Its chivalric spirit, its wildness, its tender- 
ness and beauty, are carefully preserved by the translator. 
But Southey's chief gift in this kind to English readers is 
The Cid. The poem he supposed, indeed, to be a metrical 
chronicle instead of a metrical romance — no fatal error; 
weaving together the best of the poem, the ballads and the 
chronicle, he produced more than a mere compilation. " I 
know no work of the kind in our language," wrote Cole- 
ridge, " none which, uniting the charms of romance and 
history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing, 
and yet leaves so much for after-reflection." 

Of Southey's political writings something has been said 
in a former chapter. Among works which can be brought 
under no general head, one tnat pleased the public was 
Espriellds Letters, sketches of English landscape, life, and 
manners, by a supposed Spanish traveller. The letters, giv- 
ing as they do a lively view of England at the beginning 
of the present century, still possess an interest. Apart 
from Southey's other works stands The Doctor ; nowhere 
else can one find so much of his varied erudition, his ge- 
nial spirits, his meditative wisdom. It asks for a leisurely 
reader content to ramble everywhere and no whither, and 
still pleased to take another turn because his companion 
has not yet come to an end of learning, mirth, or medita- 
tion. That the author of a book so characteristic was not 
instantly recognized, is strange. "The wit and humour 
of The Doctor" says Edgar Poe, a keen critic, " have sel- 
dom been equalled. We cannot think Southey wrote 
it." Gratitude is due to Dr. Daniel Dove from innumer- 



vn.] SOUTHEY'S WORK IN LITERATURE. 19? 

able "good little women and men," who have been de- 
lighted with his story of The Three Bears. To know that 
he had added a classic to the nursery would have been the 
pride of Southey's heart. Wide eyes entranced and peals 
of young laughter still make a triumph for one whose 
spirit, grave with a man's wisdom, was pure as the spirit 
of a little child. 



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